During year-end holiday two years ago, I experienced first hand a comprehensive meditation training in Klaten, Java. The training is held a few times in a year and draw many enthusiasts from different places. As there's a limit on the number of people per training, participants need to register themselves weeks or even months before the training starts to be invited. The limit is due to the need to host participants adequately in the small available space and to give them a more qualitative experience because normally there are only two teachers present for questions after each period of meditation.

As informed during the registration, the training requires participants to agree on a number of things. New participants will observe one set of rules and repeat participants will observe the same set with additional rules. It was a thorough training that span over the course of ten days. A few meditation techniques are introduced along the way, with each day getting more extensive than the previous. Code of disciplines, rules and timetable can be seen its course website : http://www.dhamma.org/en/code.shtml.

After the training ended, I came back but didn't manage to keep the same training regularly. I forget the extensive part of the training. Still I think it's worth my effort and time because I was able to go through something that interest me and completed it. I remember on the last day of the meditation, the teacher advised us to keep the practice going and try to make it part of our life. The practise doesn't have to be as extensive but setting aside two hours each day and keeping it consistent would suffice. He added that the more we practice each day, the better we become.

Since a few months ago up until today, I began doing a relatively short breathing meditation again. As the name implies, it's the action of focussing attention on one's own breath. I do it a few times daily with each one typically takes more or less than half an hour. I have so far been able to keep the practice going in a consistent manner. Below is my experience and observation.

I would start the meditation by sitting on a cushion with my back straight and eyes closed. In a relaxed posture and I would signal different parts of my body to rest. Then I would take a few deep breaths. Starting out, there might be stiffness around the chest, taking deep breath will weaken the stiffness and gradually they will disappear. After a while, my whole body would feel relax, I would draw my attention to the tip of the nose and focus solely on the in-out of my breath and try to sustain the attention for as long as I could with my focus fixed on the nostril. This process lasts for a while until my mind helplessly gets distracted and busy, evidenced by the arising of stream of thoughts. This will often the case cause my attention to weaken if I am not mindful. The attention might even descend into any arising thought and wander along for a while until awareness manifest itself again. Soon I would try to pull the focus back on the nostril.

The lost and found cycle of our attention would go on and on which I believe will improve over time the more we practice. I noticed a small but significant improvement over the course of a few months even though my attention still wander and lost very often during the practice. I feel that the longer I could sustain and focus my attention on breathing, the subtler the surrounding noises become. This feeling is like cotton being put into ears which made the noise considerably weaker. Also when breath becomes much more subtler, the ins, the outs and the pauses as they change can still be felt. Until this point, my mind somehow doesn't follow the arising and passing thoughts any longer. It observes them instead without being pulled into it, like a retired man sitting peacefully in his home garden observing vehicles moving past on a busy street.

During meditation, I could feel how unrestrained my mind is. With eyes closed and focus turn inward, thoughts could still arise from any past or recent encounter made with the people around me. Stored inside memory, everything I saw or heard or experienced could surface. Memory of these encounters bring along all kind of feelings and emotions — bliss, sorrow, jealousy, indignity, anger, guilt and all the kind that we could describe and label. But by simply staying put and observe without being attached to them, I feel calm and peaceful.

Sitting alone in solitude made me capable of scrutinizing my own thoughts, sometimes way before the occurrences manifested into thought. The capacity to intercept and inspect them may still be infancy but it's there and needs to be constantly sharpened. I also acquired a new idea about "perception" and it was enforced when I attended a short talk last week. The speaker described that things we generally see has gone through a lot of distortions, in a subjective way, which include our mishmash of emotions, past experiences, both pleasant and unpleasant.

Alas, I do hope that I could keep the practice going for as long as I could.