What is meditation? If you are practicing mindful breathing, then your meditation is mindful breathing. After a period of practice, take a break while maintaining mindfulness. The next step is to be mindful during meditation.
Let’s take the meditation on multiplicity as an example. Meditate for a while, and then take a break while abiding in the state of mind that was just cultivated. Meditate that the body is composed of multiple parts, including the aggregates of form, feeling, perception, etc., one by one. Then take a break and let your mind rest. Pause your meditation and rest your mind briefly in the sense of multiplicity. When the sense of multiplicity fades away, start to meditate again. You can meditate on impermanence—the arising and ceasing of aggregates moment by moment. After meditating for a while, take another break and abide in the post-meditation state of mind. This is because after meditation, your attachment and tendency to perceive things as real will dissipate, so that you can rest in the state of mindfulness. Hence, it is said, “practice during the break”. If you do many short sessions like this, your breaks will often make your meditation more real. True meditative state may arise when you relax and rest. In fact, when meditating, you are engaging in analytical meditation; whereas, when you take a break, you may abide in stabilizing meditation. It’s best to carry out these two types of meditation alternately. Your breaks will often make your meditation more real and more inspiring; They will take the clumsy, irksome rigidity out of your practice. Why do you feel rigid when sitting? Because you are trying to meditate, and the more you try, the more attached you become. You are not sure how to correctly apply the method, and your mind wanders restlessly. This indicates that you don’t even know how to use the method. Here it says “irksome rigidity”. Because you don’t know how to relax during meditation, your mind becomes rigid and tense. Rigidity, solemnity and unnaturalness. Our mind will end up being…”clumsy”! If you know how to rest, meditation will bring you more and more focus and ease. Because when you relax, your mind becomes more focused and settled. Gradually, through this interplay of breaks and sitting, the barrier between meditation and everyday life will crumble. In daily life, you can apply the same approach. Before engaging in any task, take a moment to bring up mindfulness, meditate, relax, and then begin the task. Before doing anything, meditate to bring up your mindfulness. This is called meditation.