Level 3: Meditation

Shamatha meditation is one of two essential Buddhist meditation styles, shamatha and vipashyana. Shamatha is the practice of peacefully abiding in the mind’s well-being. It is sometimes translated as mindfulness. In shamatha with support, we stabilize the mind by focusing on an object while mainly allowing the mind to rest in its natural spaciousness. Shamatha helps calm and stabilize the mind, preparing the ground for more active vipashyana meditations.

Meditation promotes peace by shedding light on the cause of our restlessness. In meditation, we experience distraction in the form of sensations, thoughts and emotions. By closely observing, we learn that chasing or attempting to fight against distraction is the source of our discomfort and agitation. So we practice allowing for whatever is arising in our awareness, and simply letting it go. This lets us to connect to our most genuine, natural state of mind, which is one of peace and stability.

The four foundations of mindfulness in Buddhism are both instructions for meditation and a glimpse of the insight that is available when we meditate. The first foundation of mindfulness is the body. By meditating on the body we learn more about the body’s true nature and its role in our suffering or happiness. We can do the same for the remaining 3 foundations of mindfulness; feeling tone, the mind itself, and the true nature of reality.

In Buddhism, feeling tone refers to vedana, a Pali word for the general affect of what it is that we notice. Namely, is it pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral? In meditation, we observe that everything in our awareness gets immediately labeled with one of the three. This labeling is not bad or wrong, but how we react to these labels is often the source of much suffering. We tend to grasp to that which is pleasant while pushing away the unpleasant. We can find peace by noticing feeling tones and our reactions to them.