Can You Zen – This site is for anyone who wants to improve and troubleshoot their meditation practice. It will aim to cover the meditation fundamentals, along with the difficulties one will commonly face.

Vipassana, or Insight Meditation, is one of the most ancient meditation techniques around today and is said to be a universal remedy for universal problems. No wonder it has drawn so much attention and interest from people from all walks of life. However, if you are not yet ready to jump into a full blown silent retreat, you may be wondering, how can I start Vipassana as a beginner? Start by becoming aware of your natural breath, the way it comes in, the way it goes out. Next you will move on to becoming aware of your bodily sensations by scanning your body in an organised and systematic way. Practicing this, you develop the two fundamental qualities of Vipassana – awareness and equanimity. Of course, there is a lot more to unpack here. You probably have a lot of questions. Let’s settle them. You’re also going to deal with many obstacles to your meditation. We will discuss some of them here. Vipassana Instructions for Beginners Environment and sitting posture The general instructions are to find a quiet place where you feel safe and won’t be exposed to distractions. As a beginner, it should also be indoors so you are not exposed to the elements and can focus inwards. Any quiet room of your home will work and if it is cold, cover yourself with a throw or blanket. Vipassana is traditionally practiced in the sitting posture. Sit in any position that feels comfortable to you. There is no requirement to sit in a particular posture. As long as you make sure that your back and neck are relatively straight. This will be conducive to an alert state of mind. If you are sitting cross legged on the floor, sit on a meditation cushion, set of folded towels or a folded blanket. Ensure that your hips are not below your knees. This will help with your posture and reduce unnecessary back pain. Place your hands where ever you feel they are comfortable. Close your eyes and try to keep them closed throughout your entire practice. Getting settled into your meditation Traditionally, there is no ‘settling in’ period in Vipassana. But if you are feeling agitated or uneasy, it can help to take a few long deep breaths to start your practice, particularly as a beginner. Start by taking three deep breaths in and out through your nose. On the in-breath, ensure that you fill the lungs all the way and that your belly expands. On the out-breath, ensure that you empty the lungs as much as possible. While you breathe, just focus on letting go and just releasing any pent-up tension. Breath awareness or Anapana Meditation Let your breath come back to its natural rhythm and just become aware of where you feel the natural breath most predominately. Usually this will be in the rise and fall of your abdomen or the passage of the breath in and out of the nostrils. However, it doesn’t matter for now, just establish awareness of where you feel the breath most easily. Just be aware and do nothing. Keep your attention on the feeling of each inbreath and each outbreath in this area of awareness. As long as you are aware that you are breathing in and aware that you are breathing out, you are doing your job. If thoughts arise, gently and calmly keep coming back to the object of your awareness. Don’t get discouraged or irritated, this is part of your practice. “Your goal is simply to be aware of what is happening, whatever it is” After a little while, you may feel that you have established some level of continuous awareness of your object. If you have been focussing on your abdomen, I want you to move your awareness to the flow of breath inside the nostrils. Ensure that you are letting your body still breathe only through the nose and completely naturally, as it wants to. Feel the cool air coming in, and the warm air moving out of the nostrils. We move to this area as it is a smaller area of concentration. Using a smaller area will make our awareness more sharp, so we can go deeper in our Vipassana practice. Stay here for a few more minutes. If you can’t feel anything in the area of the nostrils, that is completely fine, just stay with the abdomen for a few more minutes. It is much easier to feel this area and your only goal here is to maintain the continuity of your awareness. Body awareness – the essence of Vipassana Now to begin Vipassana, move your attention to the top of your head. You can actually start where ever you like but as a beginner it is best to stick to the same order of scanning your body for now. For simplicity, we’ll start at the top of the head, feeling any physically bodily sensations that you feel in this area. It can be any sensations at all. You might feel tingling, itching, heat, heaviness, lightness, pressure, pain, tension or even nothing at all. Again, it doesn’t matter what you feel. Move your attention through the rest of your scalp and then through the forehead, the eyes, the area around the eyes, the ears, the nose, the cheeks, the lips, the jaw and keeping moving through the rest of your body in whichever order suits you best. Just be aware and observe all the different sensations that appear on each part of the body. Keep scanning throughout, around 2-3 inches at a time, and don’t linger in any one area for too long. Once you have noticed a sensation on a part of the body, move on to the next part. If there is no sensation, or you can’t really tell, just stay there in that spot for several seconds and move on. It doesn’t matter at all. “The entire practice here is simply to observe your bodily sensations without reacting to them” Again, thoughts will arise. This is natural. Just let them be and bring your attention back to your body each time you notice your mind has wandered. Never try to stop your thoughts. Just keep practicing bringing your attention back without any worry at all. This is the heart of the practice. Keep doing this for as long as the target you have set for yourself, continuing to scan your body for sensations. Once you have finished one round of scanning, you can start again at the top of the head, scanning throughout in the same order. Equanimity One of the most important things you need to understand is that your practice will ebb and flow. Sometimes you be able to stay aware of your breath or sensations easily, sometimes it will be painstakingly difficult. Sometimes your mind will feel dull, sometimes it will feel energetic. Sometimes you will sit what you call a ‘good meditation’ and the next one may be what you call a ‘bad meditation’. It will always change. Eventually you will realise that there is no such thing as a ‘bad meditation’. What we call a ‘bad meditation’ simply arises as a result of our success and persistence in practicing. Your efforts have brought to the surface some latent tendency of the mind which may appear as dullness, agitation, craving, aversion or even doubt, which you must then process. “You will experience all kinds of different sensations. Some pleasant. Some unpleasant. Welcome them all.” The practice is to remain equanimous through all these states of mind. This is your goal – to accept whatever has arisen in the mind or on the body in this moment. This is the essence of Vipassana – to remain at ease, balanced with all these states and the sensations associated with them. Because you know they will change. You do not react to them, but just see them as impersonal changing phenomena. Eventually you begin to realise that reacting to this ceaseless flux of phenomena is the cause of your suffering. This is called true wisdom – something you will develop as you continue to practice. “What you are developing is experiential insight into the universal truths of impermanence, egolessness and suffering” How Long to Practice Vipassana I would recommend starting with at least 15 minute meditation sessions at minimum. Generally the longer the better, as the technique is designed to penetrate as deep into the mind as possible. However, any time spent practicing will be beneficial to you, even one minute! As you become more confident with the technique, you can slowly start increasing the length of your sits. As a beginner, you should aim to practice breath awareness for about half the time you are sitting and body awareness for the other half. This doesn’t need to be exact. If you are feeling particularly stressed out on a certain day, you can even just practice breath awareness for the entire session. Your next session will be much better after this. After you become more established in the technique, you can change the ratio to one-third breath awareness and two-thirds body awareness. When to Practice Vipassana Try to sit whenever you can or whenever it fits into your daily routine. The mornings are a great time as this is the one part of the day where you have complete control over what happens. After the busyness of the day starts, it is much harder. In saying this however, sitting twice a day is also extremely beneficial, as we are diurnal animals and our bodies operate in cycles. If you can find time to practice in the evening, it will help your practice a great deal as you will get the chance to process the experiences of the day. Also, try not to practice right after meals as you might get sleepy due to blood flow being diverted to your digestive system. So in the morning, you should practice before breakfast. In the evening, try to sit before dinner or at least 1-2 hours after dinner. Why Should I Practice Vipassana? Vipassana, or Insight meditation, means to see things as they really are. It is a simple, practical meditation and one of the original principal teachings of Siddhartha Gothama, the Buddha, that lived roughly 2500 years ago. There is probably a good reason you are reading this right now. Vipassana has triggered your interest or you may have heard fascinating things about it. The thing with most meditation techniques is that they are designed to make you relax and feel good. This is fine but they usually just stop there. They address only the symptoms of the modern lifestyle - stress, anxiety, depression. They deal mostly with the surface level of the mind, that is the conscious mind. Vipassana is designed to go deeper – to dig into the subconscious areas of your mind. To uproot all the things you have shoved down there over the course of your life. Vipassana deals with some of the deepest layers of the subconscious mind As such, it makes you confront your issues head on. Rather than divert your mind from the problem, you focus on it. All of our problems lie within, and they are connected deeply with the sensations we feel in our bodies. As you practice, you will notice that when a negative emotional state arises in you, two things happen. First you will notice that your breath becomes shorter and shallower. Second, you will notice some unpleasant sensation somewhere in the body. Most of the actions that we take in our lives are simply a reaction to the sensations we are feeling in our body at that time. It is our relationship to these sensations, that is the root cause of our suffering. We tend to push away the unpleasant sensations and want more of the pleasant sensations. By reacting to them like this, we reinforce their power over us, which creates our habit patterns and feedback loops. “You realise that every thought, feeling or emotion you experience is an impersonal and impermanent occurrence, and identifying yourself with these experiences leads to suffering.” However, if we can objectively observe the sensations we feel with a balanced state of mind, we start weakening these default neural pathways and the habitual pattern of reaction, enhancing our ability to take control of our lives. You begin the unravel the control that your feelings and emotions have over you as you see them for what they are. Constantly changing, impersonal phenomena. However, in discussing Vipassana here, we are not here to criticise any other meditation practice. Every technique has it owns benefits and is suitable to different people at different stages of their life. It all depends on what your goal is and what you want to get out of your meditation. The ultimate goal of this form of meditation, and the reason it was discovered, is to totally purify the mind and reach the stage of enlightenment. The question that the Buddha was trying to answer was “What is the path that leads to the end of all suffering?”. If your goals are similar, then Vipassana is a good candidate for you. As long as we keep distracting our selves from the root cause of our suffering, our problems will lie dormant until they naturally surface again or some event triggers them. Vipassana cuts at the root causes of suffering, instead of just trimming the hedges. It brings you eventually to a place of real and genuine peace, calm and happiness. Just Start and Be Diligent While we’ve learnt a lot here, we’ve barely scratched the surface of Vipassana here. There is a lot more to be learned but if you follow the instructions above, this is a good starting point for any beginner. Ultimately, the vastness of the technique can only be fully understood and appreciated in a retreat setting. "Persistence of practice is the key to success" Discussing Vipassana meditation deserves multitudes of books and this post barely scratches the surface of the technique. But there is only so much you can get from reading. The goal of Vipassana is to develop experiential wisdom which means you must actually practice to develop in it. You are better off actually kicking off the self-exploration process rather than spending months reading about it. The vast majority of what you have to learn and wisdom you have to gain will come from the experiential insight you develop into the nature of reality within yourself. It is this insight, and only this insight that will transform you. It will be tough but for this technique, persistence is key. So take it easy on yourself, just start, and keep practicing whenever you can. Keep smiling and be happy! Stay aware, equanimous and don’t worry – everything is fine, be happy!

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