Meditation Advice    

I have been re-reading Chogyam Trungpa’s Meditation in Action (2010).  Trungpa offers advice on meditation that is well worth passing on.  

He says that during meditation, a person should just watch his or her breathing and not “do” it.  He says, “It is easy to feel the breathing, and one has no need to be self-conscious or to try and do anything.  The breathing is simply available and one should just feel that.”(p. 78) 

Just watching one’s breathing puts an end to personal efforting during meditation.  Energies within the meditator are then freed to impel the person to enlightenment.  Trungpa says, “. . .We have a kind of spiritual instinct in us and if we are willing to open ourselves then somehow we find our way directly.”(p.71) 

If enlightenment does not emerge during meditation, which seems to be rare, it may emerge outside of it.  The essay on this website, “Zazen and Ego,” discusses an enlightenment that occurs this way, with its hallmarks of loss of the idea of self and realization of the interdependent unity of the world. 

It is not usual in Soto Zen to discuss enlightenment.  Nevertheless, it is a reality for a zazen practitioner and may arise as a surprise anytime.