The Gravity of Our Practice. . .

Meditation teaches you the power of your perceptions. You come to see how the labels you apply to things, the images with which you visualize things, have a huge influence over what you see, how they can weigh you down with suffering and stress. As the meditation develops, though, it gives you the tools you need to gain freedom from that influence. In the beginning, when you first notice the power of perception, you can easily feel overwhelmed by how pervasive it is. Suppose you’re focusing on the breath. There comes a point when you begin to wonder whether you’re focusing on the breath itself or on your ideaof the breath. Once this question arises, the normal reaction is to try to get around the idea to the raw sensation behind it. But if you’re really sensitive as you do this, you’ll notice that you’re simply replacing one caricature of the breath with another, more subtle one. The trick here is to turn this fact to your advantage. After all, you’re not meditating to get to the breath. You’re meditating to understand the processes leading to suffering so that you can put an end to them. The way you relate to your perceptions is part of these processes, so that’s what you want to see. You have to treat your experience of the breath, not as an end in itself, but as a tool for understanding the role of perception in creating suffering and stress. As you get more and more absorbed in exploring these issues, concentration becomes less a battle against disturbance and more an opportunity for inner exploration. And without even thinking about them, you’re developing the four bases of success: the desire to understand things, the persistence that keeps after your exploration, the close attention you’re paying to cause and effect, and the ingenuity you’re putting into framing the questions you ask. All these qualities contribute to concentration, help it get settled, get solid, get clear. When we have turned a corner on our practice and peered through all the veils that perception has created, what are we going to do? Our only option is to release our grip and in letting go fully, you let go of gravity, too.