The Shamatha-Vipashyana Meditation
(This is an excerpt from a University Of Metaphysical Sciences course at www.umsonline.org,
please feel free to visit the school website)
Many spiritual traditions strongly recommend practicing meditation as a way of connecting to the true Self. There are many types of meditation that are described by various spiritual teachers, and you have practiced several different types in your studies thus far. This section is dedicated to one form of meditation called shamatha-vipashyana, which is from the Buddhist tradition. This meditation comes from Pema Chodron’s book Start Where You Are: A Guide To Compassionate Living (1994). Shamatha-Vipashyana offers us a way to begin to recognize our thoughts and to realize that we are something other than our minds.
Pema Chodron suggests that in practicing this meditation, one sits upright with legs crossed and eyes open. The first part of this meditation involves becoming present to the moment by bringing awareness to the out breath. The breath is soft and relaxed. Be with the breath as it leaves the body. Pema Chodron states, “The touch on the breath is light: only about 25 percent of the awareness is on the breath. You’re not grasping or fixating on it. You’re opening, letting the breath mix with the space of the room, letting your breath just go out into space. Then there’s something like a pause, a gap until the next breath goes out again. While you’re breathing in, there could be some sense of just opening and waiting.” (5)
The second part of this meditation addresses the thoughts that inevitably arise as we try to be present with the breath. The object is not to stop these thoughts, but instead to recognize when we are thinking. Whenever we realize we’re thinking, we say “thinking” silently to ourselves. There need not be any additional judgement. All thoughts are thoughts; whether they are violent or happy they are all okay. As we see the numerous ways in which our minds wander from the breath, we begin to know all the ways in which we hide from our true Self. Pema Chodron states, “By knowing yourself, you’re coming to know humanness altogether.” (6)