Cultivating enjoyment in your meditation practice is essential. Sometimes, we are inspired to practice out of a motivation to awaken, to benefit all beings, or to see what’s possible for us if we take up this noble practice. At other times, in the face of endless demands of daily life, these motivations may feel abstract and remote and our practice might slip away. When we lack the motivation to spend time doing formal practice, it’s very often because we’ve forgotten the wellbeing of meditative pleasure-or maybe we never learned to cultivate it.
One of the Buddha’s most vital, direct, and transformative teachings is his “Discourse on Mindfulness of Breathing.” In it, we are asked to train various ways of breathing as a path towards liberation; one way in particular is meant to support this critical development of immediate wellbeing and enjoyment: One trains thus: I shall breathe in experiencing pleasure; I shall breathe out experiencing pleasure.
Pleasure? If you have been recently putting off meditation, relating to meditation as if it’s a chore, or as if it’s an old pair of worn-out boots beating an unrelenting slog through the cyclic joys and sorrows of life to some imagined greener pastures over the horizon, then perhaps this central teaching from the very source of mindfulness instructions couldn’t come at a better time.
The Buddha’s turning point, which radically changed his perspective and became the cause for him to awaken finally, was simply to stop rejecting meditative pleasure, and instead to embrace it-this was a revelation. After striving long and hard in unimaginably difficult conditions he recognized that meditative enjoyment is critical to awakening.
At this time, when our lives have been turned upside down, when good news feels hard to find, we need as much as ever to balance bearing witness to the difficult with meditation that feeds the mind/heart/body what nourishes it in immediacy. To allow our mediation to be like a glass of water on a sweltering day.
How? Do you know how to take a breath or a step, just one, in a way that feels nourishing and good? How to speak a kind word in the mind and truly feel that doing so brings peace to the heart? Try it now.
This is the only instruction you need. Careful, though, not to fall into the trap of imagining mediation as an attempt to maintain bliss for the duration. Simply sit down (or step onto your walking path) and incline toward a single moment of enjoying awareness and your wholesome intention to practice. Breathe-and-know-it in a way that uplifts the mind, if only subtly. If you do this for a single moment, you’re likely to do it for another moment, and the skill of meditative enjoyment will grow and strengthen.
If your formal practice has waned, this is a fantastic path back toward a regular formal practice. Simply plan to sit for a single moment each day and cultivate meditative enjoyment for that one moment. After that moment, you’re done. If you choose to sit longer, that’s up to you (eventually you will).
In the most trying times, we need inner and outer resources that can help us rise to meet the calls of the world and heart. May your meditation be just this. Enjoy!