8 Tips to Develop Your Practice

Buddhism/Zen, Meditation and Development.

• The word “water” cannot make you wet.(Alan Watts) Words are the concepts, or the pointers, they are not the actual. Go beyond the words and get wet. A Zen master who raised his hand to point at the moon overhead asked his students: Is this the moon, or the finger pointing at the moon?
• Let your breath become natural, try not to manipulate it. Controlling your breathing is a form of attachment.
• Keep on sitting and developing your Right Effort. Try to develop a sitting routine each day at a certain time. Join a sanga if you can find one. Continual practice is the key to results. Don’t be upset if you can’t make a sitting, but make no excuses.
• No one can walk the path for you. You have to water and feed your own seed so it may blossom.
• When meditating, if you get tired, or reach a point of discomfort, observer it how it is. Tiredness and pain are ego’s way of try keep your flower from blooming. Observe your experience how it how is, with the understanding that it will pass.
• If noise or distractions arise, let them wash over and you. If you attach to distractions, you become stuck. Let them become part of your practice. Remain aware and equanimous to reality as it is, not how you want it to be.
• Refrain from labeling or counting your breath. Breathe naturally without force. Labeling and counting is very easy to start, but hard to stop. Save yourself the problem of trying to stop later, but not starting at all.
• When thoughts or emotion arise in your mind, watch them pass like a cloud through the sky. You are not the cloud, you are the sky. Like the sky, allow all clouds to pass without judgment or attachment. Through the passing of clouds in the sky, develops stillness.