He screams and tramples, and pulls against the rope for days. At this point you can begin to feed him and to handle him with some measure of safety. Eventually you can dispense with the rope and post altogether, and train your elephant for various tasks. Now you have got a tamed elephant that can be put to useful work. In this analogy the wild elephant is your wildly active mind, the rope is mindfulness, and the post is our object of meditation, our breathing. The tamed elephant who emerges from this process is a well-trained, concentrated mind that can then be used for the exceedingly tough job of piercing the layers of illusion that obscure reality.
Meditation tames the mind. The next question we need to address is: Why choose breathing as the primary object of meditation?
Why not something a bit more interesting? Answers to this are numerous. A useful object of meditation should be one that promotes mindfulness. It should be portable, easily available, and cheap. It should also be something that will not embroil us in those states of mind from which we are trying to free ourselves, such as greed, anger, and delusion.
Breathing satisfies all these criteria and more. It is common to every human being. We all carry it with us wherever we go. It is always there, constantly available, never ceasing from birth till death, and it costs nothing. Breathing is a non-conceptual process, a thing that can be experienced directly without a need for thought.
Furthermore, it is a very living process, an aspect of life that is in constant change. The breath moves in cycles-inhalation, exhalation, breathing in, and breathing out.
Thus, it is a miniature model of life itself. Breath is a phenomenon common to all living things. A true experiential understanding of the process moves you closer to other living beings. It shows you your inherent connectedness with all of life. Finally, breathing is a present-time process. The first step in using the breath as an object of meditation is to find it. What you are looking for is the physical, tactile sensation of the air that passes in and out of the nostrils.
This is usually just inside the tip of the nose. But the exact spot varies from one person to another, depending on the shape of the nose. To find your own point, take a quick deep breath and notice and point just inside the nose or on the upper tip where you have the most distinct sensation of passing air. Now exhale and notice the sensation at the same point. It is from this point that you will follow the whole passage of breath.
When you first begin this procedure, expect to face some difficulties. Your mind will wander off constantly darting, around like a bumble bee and zooming off on wild tangents. Try not to worry. The monkey mind phenomenon is well known. It is something that every advanced meditator has had to deal with. They have pushed through it one way or another, and so can you. When it happens, just note the fact that you have been thinking, day-dreaming, worrying, or whatever.
Gently, but firmly, without getting upset or judging yourself for straying, simply return to the simple physical sensation of the breath. Then do it again the next time, and again, and again, and again. Essentially, Vipassana meditation is a process of retraining the mind. The state you are aiming for is one in which you are totally aware of everything that is happening in your own perceptual universe, exactly the way it happens, exactly when it is happening; total, unbroken awareness in present time.
This is an incredibly high goal, and not to be reached all at once. It takes practice, so we start small. We start by becoming totalIy aware of one small unit of time, just one single inhalation. And, when you succeed, you are on your way to a whole new experience of life. This concentration can be attained through constant and uninterrupted mindfulness of the mind body process.
Thus, we have a variety of objects of meditation: happiness is an object of meditation and so is anger, sorrow, painful sensation , stiffness, numbness and so on. Any mental or physical process can be the object of meditation. The purpose and the results of Samatha and Vipassana meditation are different, as are the methods.
We should go back to what I explained earlier. When we walk, we observe the movement of the foot - the lifting, pushing and dropping. At the beginning of the practice, our mind is not well concentrated on the foot. When the mind wanders, we have to follow it and observe it as it is until that wandering mind has disappear. Only after it has disappear, do we note the movement of the foot as usual. When the mind becomes well concentrated on the movement of the foot, what we note is the movement of lifting, pushing and dropping and we must not be aware of the form of the foot or the form of the body during walking.
When the foot is lifted, the mind notes it as lifting, when the foot is pushed forward, the mind notes it as pushing, when the foot is dropped, the mind notes it as dropping.
When we come to realise them as natural processes of movement, we also come to realise the mind that notes them. The lifting movement is one process and and the mind that notes it is another process.
The pushing movement is one process and the mind that notes it is another process. In this way, we thoroughly realise the two processes of mental phenomena and physical phenomena. We rightly understand this dual process as just natural processes of mental and physical phenomena. We do not take them to be a person, a being and I or you. Then there will not arise any false concept of personality, individuality, soul or self. If calmness or tranquility alone is your main goal, then choose Samatha; if insight is your goal then choose Vipassana meditation.
By insight we also mean seeing clearly or clearing the mind. We anticipate that most visitors to this blog have come here to look for resources for letting go or acceptance in some part of their lives or to manage some kind of mental disturbance like depression. In these cases it is safe to say that Vipassana meditation is the practice of choice , as it is specifically designed for seeing clearly and therefore letting go.
Solely using meditation for calmness will not resolve underlying problems in the mind or unresolved issues from the past. On a philosophical level, Vipassana meditation allows for this letting go as it is focused on observing actual reality. As Buddhism teaches us, once you use meditation to observe reality, you begin to see reality more clearly in the sense of non-permanence.
Focusing on the breath or other phenomena as they are becomes a means by which we begin to understand reality and life in a wider sense. We see the flow of things more clearly. We start to see that emotions, thoughts, sensations are never permanent and arise and cease. This leads us to cling less to negative things like depression as we realise that it is just temporary experience that will come and go like anything else.
We loosen our attachment to things that used to bother us. We develop an equanimity where we become less affected and ruffled by things that might have stressed us out before. This non judgemental observance of reality also leads to to a level of acceptance , where we come to terms and make peace with what has happened in the past. We gradually learn to let go. From drawing out these these differences we can see that for most people Vipassana is the meditation that is going to get them where they want to go more effectively.
The majority of people are not getting into meditation solely for calmness but are also looking for other benefits, like to clear their mind of baggage and negativity and for this you will need to focus on reality and not concepts.
See our Mindfulness Resources page for more information and to get started on mindfulness. The introductory 8 week course we have on that page is basically a form of Vipassana meditation for insight and letting go.
The therapy, which was pioneered by Francis Shapiro in Now, there are virtual tools as well
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