Ok, another word is, how do you organize all these techniques? We're giving you a huge toolbox. It's like you have a hammer, you have screwdrivers, you have hinges, you have saws, you have chainsaws. You have everything in there, right? How do you handle them all, it's too much! Now for some people it is too much if you look at the whole box at once, but when you're a carpenter, you don't look at the box all at once. When its time for the hammer, you grab out a hammer, when it's time for the drill, you grab out the drill.
The trick is with a carpenter they know when it is time to grab that tool. Now how do you know when the time is to grab a particular tool? First of all, you're going to have to practice with all the tools to know how they work. Nobody knows what the hammer is for unless they practice with the hammer. Nobody knows what a drill is for unless they practice with a drill. So the first thing you have to do is to learn all the tools.
Now how often do you use one tool compared to others? We're going into a kind of personality case decision here, it's not black and white. We usually recommend in the beginning to go 50% reflective meditation and 50% letting go of thought, which is the awareness of the breathing, body sensations, doing walking meditation, etc. On the reflective side there is the Compassion/Lovingkindness, Sympathetic Joy, all the reflections we're giving you here and the regular retreat. So we have reflective meditation where we develop thoughts, and we have basic body awareness meditation where we let go of thoughts. We often advise in the beginning to divide them in half, 50 % of your time spent on reflective meditation and 50% of your time spent on letting go of thought and developing awareness and clear comprehension. Now after you've started you might discover through your own personality that you shift, 60 - 40, or 40 - 60, as it needs be.
With regards to the meditation subjects some can be done every day without any worry whatsoever. You can do Compassion/Lovingkindness every day, one period every day. It won't hurt you, and it'll certainly help. It doesn't get boring if you use lots of systems. You can practice the breath awareness every day. Sharpen up a bit of concentration, mindfulness, awareness of your wandering thoughts; you can do that every day. Some like Sympathetic Joy or how fortunate you are but you can't do one hour of that every day, it's far too much. First of all for Sympathetic Joy, we will run out of people that we can have Sympathetic Joy with a little too quickly if we do it every single day because we're looking a little deeper than simply to be happy for someone who is a millionaire and so on.
How fortunate you are - get it in there, be sure to do it. Get it in there very well Do a little every day. All you really need is just a few minutes every day. And then you can do one full session maybe once every few months, if you get it in there every day really well. You have to believe it. It's very important, you have to believe you're really fortunate. If you pump it in every day one hour every day, it's going to be an overload, so you have to slack off a bit. How fortunate you are, in the beginning maybe once a week, maybe once every two weeks, it's again a personality matter.
Some of the other ones can be done every few days. Dukkha reflection should be done more often than how fortunate you are. Death reflection might not be done as much as Dukkha, because death is really just a sub-set of Dukkha anyhow, isn't it? But it's a more concentrated form of Dukkha so you wouldn't do death as much as you do Dukkha.
Be sure never to forget all the different tools and especially not to ever forget the important ones, Compassion/Lovingkindness, the awareness of the breathing, and Dukkha in particular. If you don't get a firm foundation of understanding Dukkha, then you're never going to understand the Four Noble Truths. Is there anyone here who doesn't know what the Four Noble Truths are? If there's anyone here who cannot recite them in an interview off the top of their head, you should learn them by heart because it's the basis for the practice. To understand about Dukkha, that's the first Noble Truth. That's very important.
Now as to what to do in your normal life, let's say you're going to meditate morning and evening, that would be great if you could, how are you going to organize your time. In the beginning write down all your tools. Write them all down and then make an organized schedule for the next two weeks and see what happens out of that. See what happens by making a schedule of all the tools, adjust if for the next two weeks that follow if you feel you did a bit too much of one and not enough of another. Don't forget walking meditation in your normal life. Too many meditators forget it, won't do it, couldn't care less, they miss a great opportunity. Especially in the evening if you're falling asleep when you're doing the sitting - get up, go for a walk. Do walking meditation then if you need to.
So in regards to the frequency of usage it can help to make up a schedule, to see how it fits for you and then to try a different schedule if that one didn't suit you. After a while, you may find that things flow a bit easier and you begin to know what you want to do. Even when you have a schedule, if something is very important, say tonight you planned to do a "How fortunate you are" reflection, but during the day you find out one of your friends' mother died, as Rosemary mentioned earlier. Ok, that night, maybe forget about the "How fortunate you are" meditation that was scheduled, because death is too much on your mind for the whole day. Ok, throw out the one that you had scheduled, bring in the one that has been very important for you during the day, do death reflection instead. Then that's ok to change what you are deciding to do at the beginning of the sit. But don't change in the middle, ok?
We have said this before, whatever you start with, stay with that subject until the end. If you decide, despite thinking about death during the day you still decide, "No, it's ok, I'm going to do "How fortunate I am". Then you're doing How fortunate I am and 15 minutes go by and you want to jump into death don't, because that's restlessness and that's going to encourage you to jump off to another subject in the future. So whatever you start your session with, it's always good to stay with it. If your mind goes off to another good subject, just note it and bring it back, note it and bring it back.