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The biggest limitation to the extension of experience for western meditators is the length of time they can comfortably sit cross-legged on the floor. Sometimes one would like to sit for longer, but bodily discomfort becomes a distraction. In the first year, while your body is adapting, see if you can work your meditation time up to a full hour

Our meditation and our everyday life affect each other mutually. Improvements in your meditation will serve to improve your everyday life and vise-versa. Don't be surprised if the ups and downs of everyday life seem to affect how you meditate. It is a pitfall of beginners to feel that they are making no progress or that theirmeditation is even getting worse as time goes on. However, solace can be taken in reminding oneself that many more factors affect the quality of our meditation than meet the eye. The best we can do is to make the effort to be observant about the possible connections between our inner and outer lives.

This short saying by Luangpor Dhammajayo is inscribed on a stone plaque in front of the main meditation hall at Panawat Meditation Center in Chiang Mai, Thailand. It is a simple word of inspiration for the practitioners of meditation as they enter the hall that their first step towards happiness is stilling the mind at the center of the body.

Loving-kindness meditation is not intended as an alternative to other forms of meditation but can be performed as a supplement either before or after your time of normal meditation. If you practice loving-kindness meditation for a few minutes before your normal practice, it will soften the mind, creating the feeling of spaciousness, and make progress in your regular meditation more fruitful

Our meditation techniques become simpler as we proceed further in the book. In all the techniques we have encountered up until now, we have used visualization (creating an image in the mind) as the method by which we focus the mind at the center of the body

By the time you come to this third method of Dhammakaya meditation you should find that the number of thoughts remaining in your mind is much reduced. Hopefully, you should also find that the mind is less distracted than it was before and should consequently wander less.

In this second method of Dhammakaya meditation we build on the confidence about the position of the center of the body learned from the previous chapter. Instead of initiating the mind via the seven bases of the mind, after relaxing the body and mind, we focus our mind directly at the center of the body, using a visualized object and mantra as before.

In this most basic method of Dhammakaya meditation, we acquaint ourselves with three elements which will take us further in our meditation: the visualized object of meditation, the center of the body, and the mantra.

So you would like to learn meditation. To aid you in transforming your initial enthusiasm into skills, based on experience of many meditators who have passed this same way, this chapter offers some preparatory advice before we embark on the meditation practice itself.

Human endeavour all down the ages hassough to improve our quality of life, whetherit be in the medical, technological or social spectrums. We have possibly come as far as we can in overcoming the problems solvable by material solutions. The problems that remain unsolved in spite of our material progress alert us to the fact that we need alternative strategies if we are to attain true quality of life in our world.