Question

Can you give me any more practical hints with regard to keeping my meditation practice going at home?

Answer

OK, like I said before, make a set promise of a certain amount of minutes every day for formal practice.

Special mindfulness activities: keep them going, invent a new one maybe once a week. Every day's too much, but maybe once a week. If you do that, write it on about six pieces of paper, stick one in your underpants drawer, or your socks, stick one inside your refrigerator, stick one inside your bathroom next to the mirror or something, and then you're reminding yourself what you've got to do for that week. When the week's done, take those off, try another one. Good kind spiritual friends, get together with other people.

Start a sitting group, if you don't know where one is already. As you may remember, at the end of the retreat I'll put up an address list with the names of all old students in Australia. For those people who come from other countries, write us an email and we can send you a list of people from your area. Get together, it's the number one ingredient.

Keep working with mindfulness throughout the day, special mindfulness activities, or just simply trying to be aware, moment-by-moment throughout the day. The more you're aware during the daytime, then your sitting, your walking, your formal practice will get stronger. If you only work the practice when you're doing the formal training, and then you don't do it at all during the day, then you'll continually keep them split. So put the two together. Then of course there's doing retreats at least once a year.

Our apologies if there are any errors in the above text. If anything seems to be wrong or confusing in any way, please feel free to contact the teachers for further clarification.