Special Topics
Practice Chan Without Vexations
As Master Sheng Yen said, sitting meditation has three functions: to harmonize body and mind, attain mental stability, and develop wisdom and compassion. Beginner Chan practitioners usually experience leg pain, body tension, soreness, numbness, aches, and itchiness, or may even fall into a state of dullness and torpor after only five minutes of sitting. Unable to stay awake on the cushion or constantly distracted by wandering thoughts, many feel frustrated for failing to apply the methods eff...
First Impediment: How to deal with leg pains, soreness, aches, itchiness, and numbness while meditating?
Drowsiness, wandering thoughts, controlled breathing, sore legs and overall body tension…these are the most common problems that beginners frequently encounter while meditating, leading them to adopt a hesitant attitude toward meditation practice. In fact, overcoming these problems is a start toward making progress. This time, Venerable Guo Yuan, Master of Dharma Drum Mountain Meditation Hall, will explain the causes and remedies of the five major impediments in meditation. Learning mo...
Second Impediment: Why do I feel drowsiness and leg pain when practicing in the Meditation Hall, even though everything feels fine during my meditation routine at home?
Drowsiness is most obvious phenomena arising in practitioners during Chan retreats, as participants usually feel fatigue on the first few days of retreats. Once their physical and mental fatigue is gradually relieved in the following days, participants will be able to focus better on their practice. Drowsiness is a sign of accumulated fatigue in our normal daily lives, which overstrains our body and mind without an adequate amount of relaxation to recharge. Let's try to observe ourselv...
Third Impediment: Inability to Relax the Chronically Tense Body
How do we practice relaxing ourselves? First of all, we can pay more attention to our bodily sensations, making ourselves become more aware of them. We can also observe the effects of our behavior, speech and thoughts on our physical responses. For example, when we raise our voice, talk faster, or harbor wild conjectures, which parts of our body will tense up? Upon detection, we can then focus on releasing them. When meditating, if our body tenses up habitually, we can consciously relax ou...
Fourth Impediment: Inability to Stop Unending Delusional Thoughts
After grasping the fundamentals of meditation, we may notice and wonder, "Why are there so many scattered thoughts?" whenever we sit down to practice. Many beginners will have the misperception that, prior to meditating, these thoughts do not exist, and that they must have been stirred up by the practice itself. This may lead one to mistrust the method, when in fact it is because our mind has been pacified that we are able to clearly perceive so many wandering thoughts. Another s...
Fifth Impediment: Meditation Makes Me Very Irritable, and Unable to Settle Down
First of all, we need to clarify that it is not "meditation" that makes you irritable. Instead, meditation helps you identify the causes of irritability. Feeling irritable and unable to settle down during meditation is a natural physical and mental reaction. While meditating, our body will naturally begin to adjust itself as we sit up straight with our legs crossed. During the process of adjustment, our body may experience feelings of soreness, pain, itchiness, or numbness. Perha...