Homework: Keep daily notes of your meditation experience in a diary
Keep daily notes of your meditation experience in a diary:
Taking notes of our inner experience or keeping a meditation diary will allow our practice to improve without end. Keeping such notes helps us to reflect back over the inner experiences we have achieved in our meditation – the more we reflect in such a way, the more we can observe and improve our meditation practice. Re-reading our notes helps us to achieve consistency in our moral practice and allow our understanding of it to become more profound. This will allow us to adjust the balance of our meditation more accurately, understand and overcome obstacles in meditation more easily. We will gain the know-how of the sort of mood that allows us to progress in our practice and the sort of hindrances that cause us to lose our subtlety of mind.
Benefits to practitioner
Progress will be made in our meditation practice every day.
We will become more adept in balancing ourselves and our mood in relation to the meditation.
Fosters an understanding of adjusting our approach to meditation and helps us to reflect more accurately upon ourselves.
Every entry in our diary helps us to review our meditation practice. As meditation is a meritorious deed, recollection of this merit causes the merit to be multiplied further – enhancing the radiance, clarity and wisdom of mind we bring to the meditation.
Benefits to others
The improvements we make to ourselves and our working and daily lives as a result of self-reflection will have advantages that extend to those around us too.
Helps us to be more open and responsive to the criticism and suggestions of those around us.
We will be more thorough in our dealings with the world, reducing the causes of potential conflict with those around us.
Details of practice
Keep your meditation diary in a place where it is easily seen, on a table we use regularly, with a pen near at hand. We should take a wash or a shower to put ourselves in the right mood and relax before making an entry. On returning home it would be selfish just to go about our own business paying no attention to anyone else in our family. Thus, it would be better to sit down with one’s diary only when we have made sure everything and everyone else is in order – in that way we will be able to reflect more clearly when we think back over our meditation – our becoming automatically more radiant.