Concentration meditation can be done in 5 minutes if that’s all you’ve got.
In the morning you come here, during your 5 minutes wait for the master’s teaching, you can always meditate. You can practice breathing in -‘Bud’ breathing out -‘dho’ or any kind of meditation.
Don’t allow the time to slide by. Even 5 minutes is significant.
Combining all those 5 minutes, say we’re awake for 12 hours,
5 minutes per hour, here we have 60 minutes.
That’s an hour we waste instead of practicing.
If we waste all those 5 minutes, 10 minutes, altogether we don’t have much time left.
That’s unacceptable. Your mind is too scattered an entire day.
Comes the night and you want to meditate, it’s simply impossible after being all over the place all day.
Like children playing with abandon only to come home and collapse on the bed.
They might not even make it to the house. Kids are wild.
So we should try to collect the points from those every 5 or 10 spared minutes.
Our former King was an impressive practitioner.
He said, not to me I didn’t have the honor.
Well he said to a master, I couldn’t recall which, it was a long time ago, that he sectionalized his time in many small slots.
He didn’t have the luxury of long extended free times to meditate.
His days were loaded that he needed to manage it in small slots.
If he had 5 minutes, then he’d practice for 5.
If he had 10, then he’d do 10.
That was why he was a great practitioner.
Every masters I studied with all highly praised our former King.
”He was fantastic.” “He was impressive.”
Obviously, he was far from average.”
It was because he never wasted his time. All those 5 or 10 spared minutes.
So don’t even try to use the excuse of not having enough time.
Even the King who obviously had so much more on his plates could manage.
It’s because of our own stupidity. We’re just too ignorant to cultivate ourselves.
If only we give the importance to self cultivation, we could do a whole lot more.
For monks, going out to accept food offerings is walking meditation.
Who says you don’t have enough free time?
Here, we are trying to grow a forest. While watering the plants in the evening, putting fertilizer, and what not, you can practice mindfulness along with it.
If your mind focuses on the tasks at hands,
you gain concentration or Samadha.
If you mind is aware and knows when it wanders off,
then you gain the stable concentration.
With that mindful concentration, it means you have a stable observer.
When the body moves, the mind is aware.
When the body becomes the object the mind comes to aware of,
the body will eventually reveal the 3 characteristics.
Suansantidham Temple
24 May 2020