Here are scripts for seven practices. They are all adaptations of standard meditations. The first few are for people who are starting to meditate. They are pretty easy to do after a couple of read-throughs.

Contents:
1. Basic Practice
2. Silence
3. Concentration Practice

1. Basic Practice

This practice is based upon a form of insight meditation. In order to do this basic practice, first, find someplace quiet to sit, where you won’t be disturbed.

Pick out a chair that you won’t mind sitting on for half an hour, more or less. You should be able to sit with your spine relatively straight, without slouching. You do not need to sit in the “lotus position,” or any other special posture in order to do this practice. Of course, if it’s easy for you, go ahead. It just isn’t necessary, that’s all. The most important rule for practice is… You don’t need to sit in pain!

Get some kind of timer. (Or sit with somebody who keeps time!) Some people are able to sit for just the right amount of time without any kind of timer. That’s fine, but it doesn’t matter one way or the other. A kitchen timer is good, but you don’t want it to be too loud, either the ticking sound or the bell.

When you begin this practice, you can start sitting for 10 minutes and then quickly go up to 15 minutes per session. After a while you can go up to 20 or 25, which is a good time to settle at. You can eventually work up to 45 minutes if you want, but it’s not necessary unless you are comfortable sitting for that long.

Start by just sitting down in a comfortable position. Move around until you feel good sitting where you are. Then go through your body checking for tension, and just relax. Drop your shoulders a little. Take a reasonably deep breath and let it out. If, at any time, you start feeling uncomfortable, shift around a little. This is also true about scratching. If you have to scratch really badly, go ahead. Try to put up with a little manageable pain or itching. But this practice is not about learning a new method of self-torture.

Rest your hands someplace. Some people like to put their hands together and let them rest in their lap. Others like to rest their hands palm-up on their thighs.

Some people like to close their eyes. Others like to keep them part-way open, looking at a place just in front of them on the floor. Either way… It may be best to keep your eyes closed, because if you look at one place for too long, you’re liable to get bumped into a trance. This isn’t about trances.

Breathing is very important. When you start your practice, notice how you are breathing. Pay attention to where you feel your breath coming in and going out. Do you feel it clearly in your nostrils? Or maybe you feel your abdomen moving up and down. Or maybe you can clearly feel the air filling up your lungs and then flowing out of your lungs. Wherever the place is where you feel your breath the clearest, just let your awareness settle in there.

Follow your breath coming in and then going out. Just breathe naturally. Don’t try to make your breathing different. After a while, start to say something to yourself (subvocally, silently, just to yourself) in order to help you follow your breathing. Say something like “now I am breathing in,” and “now I am breathing out,” or “in” and “out” or whatever. It doesn’t matter what you say to yourself as long as it is geared to your breathing.

Just settle down with what you have been doing. You’ve got a place to sit, you’ve got your chair to sit on, you’ve got your natural posture, and you’ve got your breathing to pay attention to. The pattern goes like this: Breathe in. While you breathe in, say “breathing in” to yourself. Then breathe out. While you breathe out, say “breathing out” to yourself. No need to rush. No need to do anything besides just sit.

After a while you will begin to notice that there is a little pause between breaths. As you settle down, the pause will probably get a little longer, but that doesn’t matter. During the pause between your breaths you can check to see if you have been thinking. It doesn’t matter whether or not you have been thinking, and it doesn’t matter what you have been thinking about. Just notice. You can say something to yourself like “thinking” if you notice you have been thinking. Sometimes you’ll get in the habit of saying “thinking” in the pause between your breaths whether or not you’ve been thinking, and it will remind you to check. There’s nothing wrong with doing this, because it will get you to actually check. But see if you can say “thinking” only when you actually notice that you have been doing it.

In addition to simply thinking thoughts, you will notice yourself doing things like planning for the future, or remembering things that happened in the past, or rehearsing, or imagining. It is important to notice these aspects of mind as they arise. You can name them separately to yourself, like “remembering” or “imagining” or whatever it is. Or you can just lump all these aspects together as “thinking.”

When you find yourself thinking, it’s not necessary to force yourself to stop thinking. The whole trick is just to notice whether you are thinking. After a while you’ll just get used to being in a place inside yourself where you can watch whether or not you are thinking, and your thinking will naturally decrease. But you don’t need to force yourself to get there.

Of course, there will be many times when you forget to do any of this. You’ll forget to follow your breath, and you’ll forget to check your thinking. When this happens, you simply start all over again. You can start to follow your breath again, and then you add the check to see if you’re thinking. Everybody loses touch. The moment you come back is a moment of awakening.

As your practice proceeds you will begin to identify other realms of awareness besides thinking. There are two other realms of experience you will notice - these are experiences of the outside environment, and the internal realm of feeling.

First you might become aware of internal bodily experiences, like a tension or pain in you shoulders. You can say something like, “inhale,” “exhale,” “tension.” Then you will probably begin to notice other feelings and moods. For instance, say that you notice you’re feeling sad. You can say something to yourself like, “inhale,” “exhale,” “sadness.” Don’t try to change what you’re feeling. Just be present with whatever is happening in a mindful way.

Next you might become aware of the external sounds around you. So you can say something like, “inhale,” “exhale,” “hearing.” And you might become aware of the movement of air against your skin. So you might say, “inhale” “exhale,” “sensation.”

At first you will probably just pay attention to thinking, because that’s what we tend to do most of all with our minds. But eventually you will become aware of the other realms of experience. As your sitting practice deepens, you will begin to distinguish the three realms - an internal realm of feelings and moods - then an external realm of sensing - as well as the realm of thoughts, memory and imagination.

But there is no need to rush. All you need to do is just sit there, following breath, and being aware of whatever arises.

2. Silence

Silence is a useful practice for learning how to become aware of the social functions of your mind, like projection and reactivity. Practicing silence also improves your ability to listen, both to yourself and to the subtle contents of your communications with others.

Usual periods of silent practice range from 3 to 10 days. A month of silence can be useful. But a convenient way to practice silence in the context of modern life is to take one day of silence for yourself, once a week, over some specific period of time, like a month or two.

You need to plan ahead. Beforehand, tell your friends that you will be practicing silence for the day. Tell them you won’t be responding to them for a while, but that doesn’t mean you don’t love them anymore. Make sure at least one close friend knows what you are doing. You might even be able to get someone (husband?, wife?, secretary?, baby sitter?) to agree to “run interference” for you for the day, in order to deal with situations that would otherwise need your attention.

Make sure your answering machine is on, but turn off the ringer and the sound for the day, so you won’t actually hear incoming calls. Turn off your cell phone.

Make sure that you have everything you need - food and beverages, etc. - so you won’t have to go shopping.

Then remain in silence from the time you wake up in the morning until the time that you go to sleep at night. Do not watch television or listen to music or the radio. Avoid reading. If you have an established silent awareness practice, you can do that. But otherwise, you can just sit and look out the window, or contemplate your life and whatever else comes up. Pay attention to feelings like irritation, restlessness or boredom. See if you can just stay with those feelings without doing anything to relieve them.

Do not avoid normal tasks like cooking and cleaning the dishes, or cleaning the house and doing the laundry. In fact, you can make that work a part of your practice. Also, you might plan to go out for one or more long walks during the day.

Whatever you do… Don’t have any social interactions with other people. Don’t look at anyone directly or exchange “knowing glances” or use gestures as a substitute for speech. Don’t write notes to people.

At some point it may be useful to go someplace public, in order to see what silence feels like among others. You might go to a shopping district and walk around for a while. But you are not there to do “social research.” You are not there to “observe” other people. Avoid making eye contact. Avoid “checking people out.” And, of course, don’t talk to anybody. If somebody says something to you that requires a response, you can say one or two words just to get out of the situation. But avoid being sucked into an interaction. If you end up having to drive, practice silent driving. Drive slowly. Leave an extra car length between you and the other drivers. Park someplace where there are extra spaces, where there won’t be any competition for a place. By all means, avoid an attack of “road-rage.”

Here are some things to notice in silence:

What does it feel like to be silent? Do you feel impatient or uncomfortable? Stay with your awareness of those feelings, without trying to change anything.

What is it like, not having to project feelings or stories onto other people?

What is it like, not having to expect or get any reaction from other people?

Of course, when you “break” silence, watch how you feel. Do you experience any difference when you interact with others? Maybe not! What, if anything, has changed?

If you want to spend several days in silence, see if there is a monastery of some kind close to where you live. Buddhist monasteries regularly provide silent retreats for lay people, and Catholic monasteries generally provide accommodations for lay people who want to go on retreat, and are happy to allow you to observe silence.

In any event, try approaching silence as a soothing vacation from the contemporary world!

3. Concentration Practice

Concentration practice compliments the basic practice described above. The purpose of basic practice is to develop the capacity to bring awareness to your experience. Concentration practice develops the ability to focus your awareness. Both skills are needed in order to achieve awakening.

To begin, start sitting exactly the same way that you did for basic practice - same place, same chair, same posture. Relax…take a deep breath in, and let it out. It’s actually a good idea to do basic practice for a short while in order to settle down. Follow your breathing and watch your awareness. But just do this for a little while.

When you are ready, carefully get the feeling of your body. Let your mind go through your entire body, part by part, in order to get a clear feeling for the posture that you are sitting in. Then get the total feeling of your whole body. See if you can hold the feeling of your entire body, not just the isolated parts.

When you have a good feel for how you are sitting, get a mental image of your body. In other words, in your mind’s eye get a picture of the posture that you are sitting in. It doesn’t matter how you envisage your posture. You may visualize a stick figure, or a geometrical impression of blocks and triangles. You may “see” yourself sitting there. Whatever comes to you, just so you get some kind of mental image related to your body. Then combine the two, the feeling and the image. Just hang out with this for a while, so you get comfortable with a clear impression of your body. This will be the object that you concentrate on - your posture.

Now the fun begins. Combine awareness of your breathing with concentration on your body. As before, follow your breathing in and out, and say to yourself something like “in” on the in breath and “out” on the out breath. When you are comfortable following your breathing, add concentration on your body in the pause between your breaths. So the practice goes like this: breathe in and out with awareness, then between breaths focus awareness on your body. You can silently say something like “body” or “posture” to yourself in order to prompt yourself to concentrate on your body. But eventually you will be able to do this automatically. Breathing in, you are aware you are breathing in - breathing out, you are aware you are breathing out - then seamlessly shift to posture, feeling your body internally and also getting a mental image of your posture.

When you are confident that you have the form down, you are ready to add one last wrinkle. What you do is, at a certain point, you intensify your concentration.

I think everybody knows how to increase their concentration on something, like a problem or an object. For instance, when you have to divide two numbers in your head, and the answer isn’t obvious, you have to focus on the problem with increased mental energy. It’s the same with your internal concept of posture.

Just continue with your awareness of breathing in and out. Then in the pause, when you shift awareness to your body, deliberately increase concentration on the object of your posture. You can say to yourself the word “intensify” as a prompt. People have described the experience as “coming in real close” or to “turning up the energy” or “carefully focusing in on it.” Whatever your own impression is, the word “intensify” seems to describe it accurately.

Along with concentration on posture, your awareness of breathing also intensifies. For instance, if you follow your breathing by focusing on your nostrils, then you should intensify that focus, too. Try to focus on the air moving through your nostrils as closely as possible. Of course, do the same if you are primarily aware of your breath someplace else, for instance if you are aware of your windpipe or lungs.

A caution here is necessary. This is not about tensing your body. Unfortunately, probably back in grade school, most of us learned to tense-up our bodies when we concentrate. But it is not necessary to tense-up when you concentrate, in fact it can be kind of pathological. So when you intensify, if you feel yourself tensing some part of your body, like your face, just relax that body part. In fact, this is almost a “side practice.” See if you can concentrate on an object, in this case your body, without tensing, and if you do start to tense-up, just let go.

Don’t intensify for the whole session. After a while, when you are ready to take a break, reduce the intensity of your concentration back to normal. Just go back to the practice you were doing before you intensified. Breathe in, breathe out, and then go to your posture. People have described the experience of shifting back to normal as “backing off” or “loosening up” or just “relaxing.” Get a good feel for what it’s like to shift from normal to intensified, then back to normal again.

When you’re ready to finish the session, go back to basic awareness practice for a little while. A little awareness practice allows you to wind down from your concentration practice.

And there you have it. You can see that this form is a bit more complicated than basic practice. But when you get used to it, the process will come naturally to you.

***

To recap the practice, start by sitting for awareness practice the way you do normally. Do a little basic practice to settle down.

Then start the concentration practice.

Get the “look and feel” of your body and posture. Then integrate this object into the flow of your awareness. Breathe “in,” breathe “out,” then shift to “posture.”

When you are ready, “intensify” for a couple of minutes. Focus carefully on your breath coming in. Focus carefully on your breath going out. Then intensify concentration on your posture.

After a couple of minutes, “back off” and relax.

Shift back and forth between “intensify” and “normal” several times.

Then just before you finish, do a little basic practice to end the sitting, breathing in, breathing out, and watching awareness.

***

When you feel comfortable with this practice, you can do it for your normal sitting period of twenty or twenty-five minutes. Don’t drop your basic practice. You can alternate practices between sittings. Or you can do both forms in one session. You could do, say, 15 minutes of awareness practice and 15 of concentration practice.