Pay attention to your mood and reflect on it after you complete the session. Could you maintain a smile, a joyous disposition? Score yourself based on how positive you were throughout your session.
Mark yourself at the end of each session.
At the end of 40 days, for example, or even two weeks, you can do a total of each segment and see what your strong points are.
Just like we ranked each session of meditation for its quality, we need to do the same for the various hurdles. It’ll help you see what’s been causing the most problems in your session. Please see the chart below:
Feel free to modify the template. If you only meditate twice or once a day, you can change it accordingly.
After each session of meditation, reflect on the quality of your meditation and mark which hurdles caused greatest distraction.
The bigger the hurdle, the greater the mark. For example, if your meditation was affected on account of feeling lazy, sleepy, dizzy, heavy or torpid, give yourself a high score under ‘dullness’.
See the table immediately after this chart to see how to ascertain which hurdle you should mark against.
It’s critical to fill this journal diligently because this is the easiest way to monitor and measure your progress.
See the table below to see which hurdles affected your session the most.
Maintaining a meditative state even when you are not meditating is just as critical as doing it when you are actually in meditation. For this reason, a good meditator maintains certain virtues at all times. This is where you really know if you’ve been meditating correctly. This is how people will notice any change in you.
Please see the chart below:
Unlike the other two charts, this one does not have morning, evening and night but morning, afternoon and evening.
It lists five key virtues a good meditator ought to practice.
At the end of each day or after completing your session of meditation, you could reflect on the past few hours and see if you generally acted mindfully, compassionately, gratefully and with humility. Reflect and see if you practiced silence by refraining from engaging in pointless gossip or telling lies.
Every time you practice a virtue, it’ll take you a step closer towards the final step.
Let’s say you sit down at night to see if you lived your day according to the virtues today. If you spoke harsh words or acted recklessly (road rage, for example) in the morning, afternoon or evening, deduct marks accordingly against that aspect. If you found yourself complaining about your life, for example, you were not being grateful. If you were boasting, you did not practice humility and so on.
Meditation is pointless if it doesn’t inspire you to lead a virtuous life.
I’ve also put some guidelines in dos and don’ts for you. Please see the table below. You could also maintain a journal for each of the seven yogic practices. It really helps in ascertaining how sincerely we’ve been carrying out the practice.
The Two Paths
A master instructed his disciple to meditate for six hours every day and do so for 10 years.
“What if I meditate for 12 hours every day?” the disciple asked. “How long will it take to reach the goal then?”
“Twenty years.”
“Really? And what if I meditate for 18 hours in a day?” “Thirty years.”
“How can that be?”
“With one eye on the goal, you only have one left to focus on the task,” the master replied.
A sprinter must run with all his might and focus. He can’t afford to look at the finish line while running. If he remains on track and doesn’t stop running, he’ll cross the finish line. It’s not very different on the path of meditation either. Your goal is not to reach some state, that’ll happen on its own if you persist diligently. Your only goal is to ensure that you practice correctly.
The more sugar you put in, the sweeter it gets. When it comes to meditation, intensity in effort equals immensity in rewards. To that effect, you have two paths of meditation: the ordinary and the extraordinary.
The Ordinary Path
Ordinary does not mean that it’s not fruitful or effective. By ordinary, I’m simply referring to the traditional path. Once again, it entirely depends on the quality of your practice. Not everyone can leave everything behind and go into a Himalayan solitude to walk the path of self-realization. Not everyone can be a Buddha or a Mahavira in terms of their life choices. In any case, you won’t know till you walk the path. The day the spark of realization ignites in your heart, your life will change forever. For those who have responsibilities and other commitments, there is the traditional path.
There are scholars who enrol in PhD on a full-time basis. Completion of their doctorate is their only focus. They are done with their coursework and dissertation within three years. Receiving their testamur and medal, they move on to apply their knowledge in the real world. And then you have some scholars who take five, even seven years, before they submit their thesis.
There’s nothing to say or prove that the one who completed it in three years is qualitatively better than the other one. It boils down to individual temperament, priority and resources. On the ordinary path of meditation, a seeker can’t devote all his or her time to just meditation. They are scholars from the latter category. They have other things to take care of –maybe a job, family, parents, or all of them. On the ordinary path, there are two types of meditators.
First is an average meditator, who holds three sessions of meditation in a span of 24 hours. Each session lasts about one hour. If they have been following this regime for a minimum of six months, they can be safely classified as average meditators.
The second is a mild meditator, who holds one or two sessions of meditation in a span of 24 hours, generally at dawn and dusk. The length of an average session of meditation for a mild practitioner is between 30 minutes to an hour.
If you put things in perspective, you’ll realize that we spend over six hours in school for more than 12 years before we secure a place in a university. We spend another three or four years at the university to earn an undergraduate degree. After 16 years of continuous effort, we get a job that starts to provide a reward for our work. To earn that reward, however, we must work another eight hours at least five days a week.
When it comes to meditation, most people have unrealistic expectations. You can’t start earning within six months. Like any other field of study or practice, this too has a specific path that requires years of effort. The only good news is that if you practice routinely as a matter of discipline, you’ll start to see subtle changes in you within a span of six months.
The Extraordinary Path
Bill Gates once said, “I never took a day off in my twenties.” The extraordinary path is for those who have found their calling in meditation, or for those who can’t wait any longer to discover their own truth. These are the scholars who drop out of school and just go for it. It was the path of Buddha, Mahavira, Ramana Maharishi, Jesus Christ and even their disciples who dropped everything to serve their cause. Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, who was a householder, walked the extraordinary path because with each passing moment all he did was to immerse himself in the glories of the Goddess.
Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Issac Newton, Van Gogh – they all walked the extraordinary path in their respective fields. Nothing other than a single-minded pursuit of their vision (not necessarily goal) mattered to them. On the extraordinary path of meditation, there are two types of meditators: intense and keen.