Day Two continued (Section 17)

Question: How long do you recommend to meditate each day to live in harmony and peace? How many times a day?

Barbara: If I tell you that you should meditate for a certain length of time, then that becomes a judgment and an obligation. If you don't do it, you're 'bad.' On the other hand, if I say just meditate when you feel like it, it would be like being a piano teacher and saying, 'Here is a piano lesson and you can practice if you feel like it.' Six months later you've learned to play a couple of notes and you say, 'Well, I'm not learning anything.' Well, if you want to learn, you've got to practice. The decision to sit needs to come from a place of loving aspiration, not from a place of obligation that says, 'I should do it this much.'

Do you exercise? Do you take walks or play tennis? Do you eat or do you starve yourselves? Do you take time to shower, to brush your teeth?

We take care of our physical bodies from a place of self-respect, because we want to be caring of ourselves. We need to meditate from that same place of self-respect. Your own inner wisdom will tell you what you need. I can give you some guidelines. They are only guidelines. Each of you is unique.

You ask how much to do so that you can live in harmony and peace. There are no guarantees. The piano teacher doesn't promise you'll become a concert pianist, only that you'll find increasing joy in music. This is the same. Heavy emotions will still arise but there will be less reactivity, more joy in life. You won't reach some ultimate level of love and peace perhaps, but will find increasing harmony, space and peace.

I'm not saying that you must meditate every day to find peace and that if you don't, you won't learn anything. Some of you are more attuned to meditation in your daily life. Some of you are not so mindful. But formal practice does enhance daily mindfulness. What you put into it will return itself to you.

These are guidelines only, then, not hard and fast rules.

First of all, I recommend you meditate every day. If you haven't meditated during the day, just sit on the edge of your bed for five minutes before lying down. Don't lie down and think, 'I'll meditate lying down,' because you'll fall right to sleep. Sit on the edge of your bed. If you're sleepy after five minutes, lie down and go to sleep. If you feel yourself alert, sit for another ten or twenty minutes. Once you say, 'It's too late. I'll do it tomorrow,' you know what happens. It's tomorrow. It's the next day, and the next day, and then, at the end of the week, you say, 'Well, I haven't meditated all week. I should meditate for three hours tonight.' That's not going to work.

Meditate every day. Let it get to be a habit, like brushing your teeth. No matter how tired you are, most of you probably brush your teeth. Same thing. Just sit for five minutes.

Ideally, I like to suggest that people meditate twice a day. Find the time of day that works best for you. If you're a morning person and wide awake in the morning, don't try to do a long meditation at night before you go to sleep. It won't work. If you're a night person, don't try to drag yourself out of bed at 5:00 a.m. and meditate. That won't work. Find a time that works, that fits into your daily schedule and your body's schedule.

For those of you who may work at a regular job, if you have a long time for lunch, sometimes that's a good time to meditate. If you have an office with a door you can close, you can sit in your office and meditate. If you have small children at home and they take a nap, meditate while they're napping. Find the time of day that works in your schedule. Once you find the time that works, write it into your schedule, 'This is my meditation time!' If somebody calls and says, 'Would you like to go for a walk?' you may answer, 'Yes, in a half an hour. Right now it's my meditation time.' I don't mean to be absolutely rigid. If something comes up that you feel you need to do right then, a friend calls and says, 'I'm feeling very sad. I need to talk,' of course you're not going to say, 'Call back in an hour. This is my meditation time.' Just cross it out and write it elsewhere, but do rewrite it into your schedule. It's the greatest gift you can give to yourself.

Make a place in your home especially for meditation. It doesn't need to be fancy. It can just be a chair or cushion in a corner and a table with flowers on it, something that invites you to relax and sit down and spend some time quietly.

When you ask me how long is ideal, in my experience, I like to ask people to build up to meditating for forty-five minutes a day. This seems to be a long enough time to really get into the practice without becoming a burden because it's so long a time. If it's too long for you, make it a half an hour. If this is new, don't start with forty-five minutes. Start with fifteen minutes. Then, add ten more minutes. Then, add ten more minutes. Build up to it.

So, once a day at a time that you've written into your schedule, do a longer meditation practice. One other time during the day practice for five to fifteen minutes, or longer. This is formal practice.

You will also want to practice with mindfulness, being fully present. You can do this throughout the day, beginning with just five minutes here, five minutes there. Brush your teeth, take a shower, eat a snack. Be fully present while you do so. If mind drifts, bring it back. Be present with the physical sensations, the taste of food, the texture, the sensation of hot or cold water on the body, soft or tingling. For one week, twice a day, simply remind yourself, 'I want to be mindful while I do this.' It doesn't have to be the same thing every day. One day it can be while you're driving your car, another day while you're taking a shower.

If mind wanders into planning or wherever it may go, simply note it, 'planning, planning,' and come back, right here, driving the car, sitting in the bathtub. Be present. The second week, do this three times a day. It doesn't have to take you any longer to do the thing than it would otherwise. You're just asking yourself to be present. The third week, four times a day. The fourth week, five times a day. Space it out, so that some time in the morning for five minutes you're being mindful, then in the afternoon, then the evening. Then keep it up. Let it become a habit really to be present. That mindfulness stretches itself out into the whole day.

There is a wonderful practice that I learned from a Vietnamese meditation master, Thich Nhat Hanh. I once did a retreat at his meditation center in France. Part of the practice there is that every time a bell rings, a telephone or a beeper on your watch, or a chiming clock, any kind of bell, you stop, take three deep breaths and then just pick up again.

There's a big grandfather clock in the dining room and it chimes every half hour. You see people eating and the bell chimes. The hand freezes part way to the mouth, soup in the bowl of the spoon. Three breathes, and they go on, back to eating. If you have a beeper on your watch, you can set it to go off once an hour just to remind yourself, 'Stop! Stop! Take three deep breaths. Come back into the body. Come back into the present moment.' Just be here with three breaths and then go on. When the telephone rings-this is wonderful if you and your friends all learn to do this together-you take three deep breaths before you answer it and your friend on the other end is also taking three breaths during the ringing of the phone and waiting for you to answer it. You're both taking three breaths. When you answer, you're connected. You both had that quiet three breaths together. So, this is a wonderful device to remind you to come back and stay in the present.

I cannot overstate the importance of formal meditation practice. But, if you can't do it, if this is a time in your life when, for whatever reason, you find you can't meditate, continue with mindfulness, just being present. Each supports the other. Both are very valuable. If I had to choose one, I would tell you to be mindful, because that mindfulness will naturally lead you to want to meditate. But, they support each other.

It's also very helpful to meditate with others. Find, or create, a meditation group. Even just getting together once a week with two or three friends, to sit for half an hour and then have tea afterward, can be a very useful way to nourish your meditation.

It's helpful to have a teacher. As I said before, lacking a teacher, there are good books that are helpful. I can recommend some. There are tapes. There's a group called Dharma Seed Tape Library which offers many tapes with instructions on meditation by well-respected teachers. So, these are all things that can help support your meditation.

Question: How could I introduce my children into meditation?

Barbara: First, you cannot push them into it. There are two things that I did with my children that worked. One, when I got up in the morning, very early, I would sit and meditate. They would want a hug from Mommy when they woke up. They were invited to come and sit on my lap. I sat on a cushion like this, and I had candles lit, and the room was very peaceful. I had a blanket wrapped around me. A little boy would come in and sit on my lap and I'd wrap him up with me in the blanket. He'd just sit there with me, sometimes for five or ten minutes. When he'd had enough, he would get up and leave the room. The rule was, 'you can sit here as long as you want, but you've got to be quiet.' Sometimes I had more than one on my lap. When they had had enough, they would get up and get a book or crayons and come back and just crayon or read quietly right there in my presence.

And so, they experienced the atmosphere of meditation. They learned to respect the fact that this was something that I very much valued, and they enjoyed the feeling of serenity but no one said, 'You should meditate.'

The other thing that I did with them as they got older was to make it very clear, 'I value this.' You can't say to a three year old, 'You can't disturb me if you need something.' Of course not. But to a six year old you can be very clear, 'This is my meditation time. I love you, but this is important to me and I need to do this for half an hour and you need to respect it. Do you need anything? Are you hungry? Are you cold? Everything settled? Okay, for half an hour I'm going to meditate.' And so, they really learned to respect that, that it was something that I valued, and because I valued it, they began to look into it.

I have three sons, aged sixteen, twenty-one, and twenty-four. The older two meditate. The younger one says he wants nothing to do with it, but last month in his room I found two of my candle sticks and some incense. I said, 'Peter, are you meditating with these in your room?' He said, 'I was just fooling around with them,' but I noticed they're still there. So, I have no idea if he meditates or why he has my candles and incense in his room. He's a sixteen year old and what I'm doing, he doesn't want to be doing.

There are some very beautiful books about introducing your child to meditation. You can look for them in bookstores.

We need to break for lunch in thirty minutes, so I'd like us to sit quietly.

(Thirty minute meditation. Lunch. Rest.)