Meditation Part 3: Empty Mind Meditation
This really is the simplest form of meditation to describe, yet it’s one of the hardest to master. Here are the steps involved:
1. Sit comfortably. Pain of any kind is distracting.
2. Think of … nothing.
Yep. That’s it. Clear your mind. When your mind wanders, don’t chastise yourself of complain about it, just quickly switch back to thinking of nothing. If it helps, visualize blank paper, white void, total darkness, whatever works for you. Just don’t consciously think to yourself, ‚ÄúI’m thinking of nothing,‚Äù or ‚ÄúOh, look, it’s white paper.‚Äù That’s just thinking of a different kind.
The goal is absence of thought entirely. It’s incredibly difficult, because our minds tend to wander or go off about all sorts of odd things. This is where the term ‚Äúmonkey mind‚Äù applies. While your body is just sitting there with your eyes closed, your mind wants to climb trees and shout at the top of it’s lungs.
This form of meditation, above all others, really is done best in a very quiet environment; it’s just so easy to become distracted that anything you can do to remove distractions is a good thing. Once you find that you can easily ‚Äútune out‚Äù everything in the outside world, you are on a good start down the path of meditation. If you find yourself losing track of time doing this, you are doing well; sometimes you can sit for what seems like hours and later find that only a minute or two has passed, and sometimes it works just the opposite. Being able to quiet your mind is essential to meditation and many of the more spiritual aspects of meditation.
Try sitting in silence, not thinking at all for just five minutes. It’s far harder than it sounds.
Just Sit.
.
We’ve briefly covered this one, but it is essentially what it sounds like: meditating while walking. You can do this while walking, running, or just pacing around the room in a circle. You focus your mind on how your body moves during the activity. This is not sightseeing, so your focus should be internal. How do your arms swing, how do your legs move, what about the muscles in your stomach and back? How does the activity affect your breathing?
In Zen, practitioners have ritualized this walking meditation into something called “Kinhin.”Kinhin is a very slow walk, going clockwise around the room. One hand is closed in a fist, while the other hand covers the fist. One step is taken for each full breath, so the circle moves very slowly. It is quite common to do kinhin between long periods of sitting meditations.