The Art of Concentration Session 2 Rerun: Lesson 6

Hello Everyone

Having spent the last week genuinely establishing and developing our direct perception on the teeth, we now go on to refine our skill in how we come to land on, concentrate on, and stabilise our meditation object. We also look at how to overcome the hindrances of restlessness and dullness. This is a hugely important practice. Here we are seeking to build up the energy of our initial application in a balanced way so our mind has enough energy when it comes to developing deeper and more sustained concentration. By building up the energy of our mind we overcome the ignorant energy in our mind and by moving through the body systematically and methodically we wear away our restlessness in stages. The specifics of how to do this are in the instructions of the meditative discourse I have shared this week. This part of the preliminary work is extremely important and I recommend you really work at this, it has many benefits including organising and correcting fragmented attention, a common problem generally. I will go into this issue of fragmented attention and our general lack of concentration nowadays in detail later in the course.

I suggest you listen to the instructions while meditating to absorb them and integrate them. You might find you only need to do this two or three times. After that you may find that the amount of instruction starts to get in the way of your meditation. At that point you should return to the teeth, but instead of working only on direct perception try to stop and stay on each tooth for a minute and practice gathering settling and staying there before moving on.

Next week we will give you a simple road map through the body to continue this practice with. At this stage aiming for one minute in one place is the most skilful approach, rather than trying to stay longer but with less quality of attention. All that said I do recommend that everyone listens to these instructions at least a few times during the week.

with metta

Burgs.