Concentration & Meditation

The practice has been building toward this from the beginning.

Concentration practices develop the capacity for sustained, directed attention, direct observation of the mind and its movements, these include techniques such as trāṭak (fixed external or internal gazing) that cultivate the quality of unbroken attention that meditation requires.

Meditation proper arises from concentration: when attention has become sufficiently stable that it can rest in awareness itself, rather than moving from object to object; this is not a state to be produced but a recognition that becomes available as the earlier practices do their work.

Meditation in this tradition is not about achieving peace or silencing the mind, it is about developing a relationship with experience that is direct, honest, and increasingly unmediated by habitual reaction.

This is the eighth piece in the Elements of Practice series. Next: Closing Practice — how the session ends, and what it asks of us.