The Sitting
The point is to sit down and stay sat, by whichever of three doors opens today.
You need a timer and somewhere to sit. Ten minutes to start.
Sit on a chair with your feet on the floor, or lie down, or stand at a counter with your hands in water. Upright keeps you awake longer; lying down is fine if upright is not available. Set the timer.
Take one door. Do not use one door to arrive at another.
iThe door of counting. Find where you feel the breath most clearly — the air at the nostrils, the chest rising, the belly moving, the cool patch at the top of the throat. Pick one and stay with it. Do not change your breathing.
Count each out-breath: one, two, up to ten. Then start again at one. When the count goes, start again at one. Losing count is the practice, not a failure of it.
When a thought or sensation is strong enough to pull you off the count, give it one word — planning, aching, sore, wanting — and go back to the breath. Do not follow it or work out what it means.
iiThe door of not improving. Do not improve anything. Do not fix your posture, your breathing, or your mood. Leave them as they are.
When the mind offers work — a plan, an old argument, tomorrow's good line — let it come and do not take it up. Do not wait for a quiet mind. A practice that needs a quiet mind is for people who already have one.
Nothing here is being cultivated. If it helps, it helped by accident.
If gladness turns up without a reason attached to it, let it be glad. Do not build a church on it. Do not spend it as proof.
If nothing is underneath, the tide is out and the bay stinks.
Sit in the mud. Do not get up to look for something better.
iiiThe door of no object. Do not count. Do not name anything. Leave the room as it is.
Rest your eyes on something ordinary — the edge of the table, the corner of the ceiling. Say to yourself: "I am looking at the table." That is the whole of it. This is not a meditation on the table.
Then notice that something is looking at you, or could be. The window can see you. The light lands on you. The room holds you inside it. Say: "The room can see me."
Then stop locating the looker. Notice that looking is happening — the table is there, the light is landing, the seeing is going on — and stop checking whether anyone is behind the eyes doing it. Do not try to experience it. Notice it the way you notice a room is quiet: not by making quiet, by having stopped making noise. When the sense of an owner comes back, let it come back. Then let it go again. Keep looking. Do not try to keep it; the trying is what puts the owner back.
End when you end, not when it works. Keep no count of days — a streak is a ladder with better branding.
The kettle clicks off. Get up. There is a person in a kitchen holding a cup, and the crown is back in their other hand. Do the next ordinary thing — make the tea, answer the email, take out the trash. Nothing about this excused you from anything you owed before you sat down. The practice did not pay the debt. It cleared the room in which the debt is paid. Then pay it.
Do this again tomorrow.
Keep no record of how well it went.