Practicing Your Scales Thanissaro Bhikkhu

Practicing Your Scales
Thanissaro Bhikkhu

There’s a book in our library on learning how to swim. It’s there not because the monks are planning to swim, but because it describes the learning process so well. It talks about how to practice swimming, and the principles apply to any kind of skill that when you’re practicing. You don’t just go through the motions or put in the time.

You have to observe what’s the most efficient way of getting through the water.

How do you hold your head, how do you watch your stroke to see how you can make your stroke more efficient, so you can use less energy and at the same time go faster, go longer?

It’s the same way with working on those scales [on the piano]: What’s the most efficient way of holding your hands, your arms, your torso to get the best-sounding notes out of the piano? 

This way, what in the beginning is a very effortful process really does become effortless as you streamline your understanding of what you are doing.

It’s the same with the meditation. You find that you have to learn how to streamline your understanding of what it means to keep the mind focused. You start out by basically doing too much: You tense up the body, you engage all kinds of other parts of the mind to try to keep the mind here, and yet you can’t maintain that amount of tension. The mind is sure to slip off . Then you try to have no effort at all, and of course it’s going to slip to again.

What you’ve got to do is notice, “Which part of the effort is necessary, which part is not? 

Where’s the excess energy that’s being expended on this that’s making it more difficult than it has to be?

What’s the most efficient way of staying with the breath?

What’s the most efficient place to focus? The most efficient way of understanding the breath that helps you stay there so that the amount of effort you put into each moment of meditation is totally possible, totally sustainable? That way you really do develop a sense of ease with being with the breath. So you’ve got to be observant."

Practicing Your Scales
Thanissaro Bhikkhu

https://www.dhammatalks.org/books/ePubDhammaTalks_v3/Section0020.html