TLDR: To meditate consistently, the practice of overcoming distractions and hindrances is aided by patient endurance, being intent and purposeful about practice, the creation of supportive conditions, ethical conduct and an experiential taste of the stillness and fruits that meditation brings.

“This is not a meditation story, this is a story about meditation.”

I began my meditation journey in earnest, one-and-a-half years ago in January 2024. Going through many consecutive days of meditation has brought a shift in the perspectives I take towards life and practice. These perspectives have brought clarity and a subtle joy and faith that inspires more practice.

How it Started: Boringly

My first experiences with sitting meditation was when I was a secondary school student ten-plus years ago, when I learnt meditation from a Buddhist Zen center. Back then, I found sitting meditation to be a boring and restless experience, filled with many thoughts and ideas about what to do when the session was (finally) over.

I often emerged from those sessions having many more thoughts than when I started, and often emerged feeling more refreshed for a different reason when I ended up napping mid-meditation.

All this is not to say that my early experiences with meditation were bad—I was taught the significance of meditation, but with the way it was going, I never thought that it was going to be more than an occasional priority, revisiting the same experiences of tedium over and over again.

Why I Chose to Continue

The unexpected trigger for me to meditate more was due to a very mundane reason: I wanted to woo someone who was a Buddhist, and thought that I could better qualify by being a “better” Buddhist myself through regularly meditating. The pursuit fell through, but the meditation habit remained, and my experience of meditation began to change as well.

What is Meditation?

Meditation is practiced for religious and secular reasons, utilising ancient and contemporary methods: the approaches and goals of meditation are myriad and varied.

For example, in the Buddhist context, Mindfulness of Breathing (Ānāpānassati) meditation is practiced with liberation as the goal, where the cultivation of mindfulness develops the factors of awakening, and the cultivation of the factors of awakening brings about knowledge and liberation. 

To give a description of the mindfulness of breathing practice, I present excerpts from the Ānāpānassatisutta – MN118:

It’s when a mendicant—gone to a wilderness, or to the root of a tree, or to an empty hut—sits down cross-legged, sets their body straight, and establishes mindfulness in their presence. Just mindful, they breathe in. Mindful, they breathe out. Breathing in heavily they know: ‘I’m breathing in heavily.’ Breathing out heavily they know: ‘I’m breathing out heavily.’ When breathing in lightly they know: ‘I’m breathing in lightly.

…

They practice like this: ‘I’ll breathe in observing letting go.’ They practice like this: ‘I’ll breathe out observing letting go.’

We can practice meditation just as the Buddha taught.

The style of meditation I practice also involves the awareness of the breathing process. With the breath as an anchor (and not the subject), I practice observing the arising and fading away of feelings, thoughts and mental phenomena without endeavoring to stop them or to indulge in them, and in so doing, still the mind. It is the process of letting go of our attachments to phenomena, and staying vigilant in the moment, not creating mental and conceptual constructions in our mind.

This is not a recommendation to do the same: the sort of meditation that you prefer and works for you would likely be different. If we need guidance, we should practice meditation just as the Buddha taught. 🙂

Reflections on the (Ongoing) Journey

These reflections are written with the aim of preserving the practice of making time and space to sit in meditation daily. To aim to sit for 500, even 600+ days in a row is a very daunting and challenging prospect, with much uncertainty on the outcome: but in truth all we are doing is waking up daily and saying: “I will sit today.”

1. Start small.
Starting small helped a lot—the daily 15-minute chunks of meditation felt a lot more manageable compared to thinking of devoting 30 minutes straightaway for practice. With time, I slowly increased the duration of the time allocated to sitting.

2. The beginning is hard (tedious) but the habits take over.
I use the Insight Timer app to track my meditation sessions. To preserve my streak of consecutive meditation days in the app, I now vaguely recall instances where I frantically tried to sit and establish some silence and quiet for 5 minutes before midnight passed. On other days, the topic of meditation hung over my mind the entire day before I finally got it done at night.

The daily sittings reaffirmed* that there was a good time to sit (anytime), and an even better time to sit (!): Sit early in the morning right after you wake up, when your body is refreshed, your mind is awake and clear, and not yet cluttered with the day’s events.

By centering the practice around waking earlier and sitting right afterwards (big plus if you don’t scroll on your phone first), you make the process a part of your natural rhythm of the day.

* I recall this tip as being recommended by Ven. Shih Chi Boon (of Kwan Yin Chan Lin Zen Centre)

3. The process is noisy and non-linear.
There were many closely-spaced milestones being achieved in the early days (7 days in a row, 10 days in a row, 20 days, 30 days, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, … 100! days in a row) that served as a source of motivation (for a numbers-driven person like myself, though it may not be as appealing for everyone).

But the early sits were also full of distractions—a wandering mind, a constantly-thinking mind, a bothered and confused mind, endless thoughts, a heavy dose of restlessness and boredom, inwardly counting the minutes to the end of the session & much sleepiness.

There were many ‘bad’ days, where I hardly felt that I was sitting, and fewer days that I would emerge thinking that I had done a good job. How should we address this? With ‘patient forbearance’ (khanti). Looking back, I would characterize the process as being noisy and non-linear.

Why ‘noisy’? Because the good sits were interspersed with the ‘bad’ sits, and the bad sits followed by more ‘bad” sits (perhaps due to life stressors and other factors), but I would find out much later from looking back that daily sitting became more mellow and less of a struggle for me. In time, they became more neutral and pleasant as well.

The noise and restlessness that we encounter in our meditation is a natural part of the process; it’s not a reason to criticise ourselves, or treat ourselves harshly. This is something that I am working on. We learn about our minds and their tendencies during such periods as well.

This is my subjective reflection about how the process went for me. Your own experience would definitely be different, and my reflection can never serve as a substitute for your own experience. To know how your own story with meditation unfolds, you have to patiently sit, day-by-day. With some distance, looking back on your own journey will tell you what it has been like for you.

Sometimes the process may be uncomfortable and distressing. It is important to then calm our distress.

“When the forest is quiet, the animals come out to play”: When you are occupied with your daily activities, unmindful, it is like a hunter that tramples noisily and unmindful in the forest. All the animals go into hiding. When the hunter is gone, and the forest is quiet, the animals come out to play.

The animals are like our thoughts, tendencies and impulses that surface when the mind is quiet(er). They often lurk in the forest, but unmindful that we are in our daily lives, we fail to notice their presence.

A version of this story above was once shared by a Zen Master. Reminding myself of the metaphor of the mind as the ‘forest’ and the phenomena within as the ‘animals’ helped to calm my distress and anxiety at being confronted with distressing and agitating thoughts that seemed to emerge during and after meditation.

4. It is a blessing to have supportive conditions for practice.
Looking back, although full of ups and downs (many of it self-created) this period of life has been marked with normalcy and a lack of significant, life-changing events, and I realise now that I have been blessed to be in the midst of conditions supportive for practice.

As with all things, this situation is impermanent and subject to change, but while it lasts, it is a good time to build up my familiarity with the practice of meditation. There is never a perfect time to practice (on some days when the rhythm is broken, I have to drag myself to sit very unwillingly). Even through bouts of brief illnesses, the circumstances have been benign enough that one can still practice amidst some physical pain, and this has allowed me to keep the streak unbroken and going.

Faced with the uncertain and the unknown, when we wake up and decide that we will devote time to practice today, we create conditions supportive for practice.

5. Sīla (conduct) is an essential foundation for meditation.

Extending on the point of creating conditions supportive for practice, it is said in AN11.2 Cetanākaraṇīyasutta**:

“Mendicants, an ethical person, who has fulfilled ethical conduct, need not make a wish: ‘May I have no regrets!’ It’s only natural that an ethical person has no regrets.

When you have no regrets you need not make a wish: ‘May I feel joy!’ It’s only natural that joy springs up when you have no regrets.

When you feel joy you need not make a wish: ‘May I experience rapture!’ It’s only natural that rapture arises when you’re joyful.

When your mind is full of rapture you need not make a wish: ‘May my body become tranquil!’ It’s only natural that your body becomes tranquil when your mind is full of rapture.

When your body is tranquil you need not make a wish: ‘May I feel bliss!’ It’s only natural to feel bliss when your body is tranquil.

When you feel bliss you need not make a wish: ‘May my mind be immersed in samādhi!’ It’s only natural for the mind to become immersed in samādhi when you feel bliss.”

Here we can see that the establishment of ethical conduct leads to the natural occurrence of non-regret, joy, rapture, tranquility, bliss and samadhi—a state of stability, stillness and an unperturbed mind.

The creation of supportive conditions for practice means also the establishment of good conduct. If we seek peaceful meditation, we should uphold virtuous and ethical conduct, and peaceful meditation would naturally follow.

Dhammapada, Verse 183 states: Not to do any evil; to embrace the good; to purify one’s mind: this is the instruction of the Buddhas.

To make space for the naturally-occurring fruits of non-regret, joy, tranquility, bliss and samadhi: which of the unhelpful tendencies that hinder our daily life and meditative practice are we willing to relinquish and let go?

** My gratitude to a good friend who helpfully pointed to this sutta.

6. A Taste of Stillness
It is hard to motivate a case for meditating daily if there were absolutely no realized benefits of doing so. Thankfully, I found that the practice of daily meditation was correlated with experiences of calmness and peace for me—a profound taste of stillness, mostly experienced in daily life when the mind goes quiet(er).

I interpret this as the experience involving the absence of wanting and clinging as a blissful state—a third route that we could take beyond the dissatisfaction, pain and suffering of striving for pleasant and good situations, and the aversion towards unpleasant and bad situations (all modes and aspects encompassed in the Noble Truth of Suffering).

There are other associated benefits with meditative practice and stillness. It enables one to stop and see clearly. When we see clearly, less affected by the bias of seeking the pleasant and being averse to the unpleasant, we are given the capacity to choose more helpful attitudes and courses of action.

When we can stop and see clearly, we are more receptive to the truth. The experience of stillness soothes our agitations and anxieties and helps us to let go: the (temporary) respite gives us a chance to let go of views, tendencies and actions that lead to further turmoil and agitation and to dwell instead in peace.

The fruits of the correct and proper practice of mindfulness are multitudinous and varied, ultimately leading to awakening, knowledge & liberation (Ānāpānassatisutta – MN118).

7. Ask yourself: “Why do I meditate?”
Are the intentions you set for your meditation aligned with (1) the proper aims and practice of meditation? (2) a life well-lived (in both its spiritual and non-spiritual aspects)? For example, to me meditation is about letting go. Then, mistaken ideas and attitudes about spiritual progress and attainment achieved through meditation that I often find myself caught up in would not be aligned with its proper aims and practice. It is very hard to give a proper and thorough treatment of this point.

Our intentions and views about meditative practice shapes our approaches towards meditation, and being obstinate and stubborn to practice can be more harmful than not practicing (when we reinforce wrong views).

The effects of being mistaken about meditation can be serious, so it is very important to be reflective, open-minded and to seek correct instruction and counsel from authoritative sources and wise people to develop one’s meditative practice. Practicing meditation just as the Buddha taught also means practice grounded in and in accord with the Dhamma.

8. Handful of Leaves: Meditation Is Not Only On The Cushion
Lastly, it is written in another Handful of Leaves article that meditation does not have to happen only one way, at a specific time and in a dedicated space.

Just as we enjoy and benefit from the fruits of our practice in our daily life, beyond formal practice, our meditation and mindfulness extends to and is not separate from everyday life.

May we all continue to be diligent and practice correctly!

FYI: The streak has been broken. The mind’s reaction to that can also be useful for reflection.

Wise Steps

• Meditate daily (consistently); be patient and unperturbed.
• Cultivate supportive conditions for practice—through ethical conduct, the right mindset, and consistency.
• The fruits of meditation can be transformative, seek correct instruction and practice correctly in accordance with the Dhamma.