Thursday, April 2, 2026

Thursday, April 2, 2026

In one Buddhist teaching the progress of the mind of a meditator, from being a novice to a skilled meditator, is equated with three bodies of water: waterfall, river and lake.

WATERFALL
The mind of a beginner is like a waterfall. When you sit to meditate, your mind thunders with torrents of thoughts and feelings. You are oblivious to physical sensations. Even when torrents of thought tighten your muscles, you are clueless. You don’t know you are tense.

Focus on your breath and try to get in touch with your physical sensations. Sit with your eyes closed for 15 minutes and then move on to journaling. Your awareness of what you are doing and who you are is a powerful grounding tool at this stage.

Following the meditation, pour out your excessive emotions and fleeting thoughts into your notebook. Journaling will absorb the gushing overflow. Your writing may catch some drips from the spill, but the body and the breath will keep you anchored. 

RIVER
An intermediate practitioner’s mind grows from the torrential waterfall to a flowing river. You attend to the body sensations and observe your feelings and thoughts as a continuous flow. The river’s flow does not feel as overwhelming as the gushing of the waterfall. It is slower and gentler. Self-doubt and negative thoughts loosen their grip. You are not as impulsive as you used to be. If things disturb you, you pause and mull over them. People no longer seem to disturb your mental peace. If they need responding, you respond. Otherwise you don’t react, you let go of their opinions and arguments.

LAKE
Finally, as a skilled meditator you are calm. Your flow is smooth, vast, and open like the surface of a lake without ripples. Your practice is a continuous state of meditative awareness. When you experience intense emotions, positive or negative, you do not get overexcited or agitated. Instead, you discard them in your journal and transcend them in your creative activity.

Above and beyond these three categories is the adept or master meditator. This level of expertise in meditation is not necessary unless you desire to become a spiritual teacher. For an adept meditator, the balance shifts from enriching and refining their life to deep spirituality. Such a person experiences constant meditative joy of awareness and is one with the divine within.

Neuroscientist Sara Lazar of Massachusetts General and Harvard Medical School has studied the stages of meditation. She observes that people who practice daily meditation have more gray matter in their frontal cortex. This part of the brain is linked to decision making and working memory. Her conclusion? While most people see their frontal cortex shrink as they age, those who meditate 15-45 minutes daily have the same amount of gray matter as those who are half their age.