Dr. Patricia Carrington discusses how you can handle interruptions during meditation, whether you should mediate in the same place all the time, or burn incense all the time.
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Establishing a Meditation Routine
This audio clip is excerpted from Dr. Patricia Carrington’s Learn to Meditate Course
And now let’s discuss some of the practical problems that I’m sure are going through your mind about the meditation routine.
First, handling interruptions; all of us at one time or another are interrupted during meditation, no matter how careful we are to be in a quiet place and to make all the preparations that I’ve suggested. At one time, or another, they’ll be someone, or there’s something, which demands your attention during meditation, so that you have to stop to pay attention to it.
The thing to remember, if you’re interrupted during meditation is, to play for time. You don’t want to jump up suddenly out of meditation, any more than you’d jump up suddenly out of a very deep sleep. With ordinary interruptions, you want to take your time to respond.
Say that somebody’s knocking at your door and asking you to pay attention to them. You simply tell them, “I’ll be there in a couple of minutes.” And, then, take about 20 to 30 seconds to come out of meditation. Slowly open your eyes, gradually get up very leisurely, and go and take care of whatever has to be done. And then, after you’ve handled the interruption, come back and finish off your meditation with as much time as is left in the session.
That means that if 7 minutes is left of your meditation time, then you finish up with 7 minutes. If 5 minutes is left you finish off with 5 minutes, and so on. Finishing off with meditation, after the interruption, seems to take the edge off the experience of being interrupted.
By the way, it’s a very good idea to put a meditation signal outside of your door, so that family members, friends, roommates, whoever, will know you’re meditating. Other people don’t know unless they are told, or unless they see a signal.
What we do in my family is to take a paper handkerchief and punch a hole in the center of it. And then, we put the handkerchief on the outside of the door knob so that it slips over the door knob. Then, anyone coming along can see it and they recognized from the signal that you’re in the room meditating and they know they’re not to come in. It happens to be an easy kind of signal to arrange, but you may find one of your own that’s just as effective.
This brings us to the question of whether or not you should always meditate in the same place, or whether you should burn incense with your meditation, if you did when you were first learning.
The answer is that you should not meditate in the same place at all times and that even if you enjoy incense, you should not always use it with your meditation.
You also should not always meditate in the presence of any particular person. The reasons are that you don’t want to connect meditation with any unvarying circumstance, so that then you won’t be able to meditate unless you have this circumstance.
You want your meditation to be completely portable, so that you can meditate on a train, or a plane, or a bus, or wherever you happen to be. In other words, don’t become so tied down to any specific surroundings in connection with your meditation that it’s impossible for you to meditate without them.
Let the meditation become something you can carry with you wherever you go.
This easy-to-follow instruction kit contains downloads of the 8 audios, plus the Learn to Meditate Manual (PDF) and the Interactive PDF Workbook. Using this method you can master meditation within a week and feel its powerful effects at once. See complete details…
