For this meditation we use a stone or a pebble. We place a pebble/rock/stone in our hand and keep our awareness on the contact between the hand and the stone. We try and be with the sensation of that contact (noting without analysing). We are not trying to “penetrate” the stone, something meditators will often do: contemplating the stone as part of the universe, that the stone and I are one, etc. These are valid, but different, exercises. In this exercise, we simply stay with the contact, its sensations.

When I notice that the mind has shifted its awareness and I am no longer with the contact of my hand with the stone, I place the stone in my other hand and recommit myself to awareness of the contact. I keep coming back to awareness of contact (and switching hands), letting go of judgments, or expectations. This is not about how many times I switched hands, or that I lost my awareness and allowed it to shift, but rather about the recognition “I am no longer with the stone.”

In the Satipatthana, the Buddha says that when one becomes aware that s/he is not aware, awareness arises. It is when my mind drifts and I am not aware that I am day dreaming, that is when there is no awareness. But the moment I become aware, although I might feel like “whoops,” my awareness is automatically being re-established. Awareness, even if it is of non-awareness, is awareness!

This is the basic instruction. I learned this meditation originally from Thay Doji.

In my own playing with it, I could see that this is also useful for seeing many states of mind, the many subtle shifts that happen. For example, I might have awareness of the stone, and in the background of my mind something else is also going on. At what point do I decide that this other thought is now considered to be “foreground” enough to justify switching hands (in other words, to actively release the other thought)? I start seeing that the background and foreground are almost always quite mixed and come in many “degrees.”

When I look at the decision of whether to switch hands, I also encounter lots of nuances. At first, I resist, I get frustrated that “I am supposed to be meditating, how dare this thought interfere with my meditation?” As I begin to soften that and accept that the meditating mind is not blank, but full of many thoughts, I start to see that the thoughts are not necessarily “anti-meditation” but can be used as food for meditation. Then I see hesitation “does this thought incident justify hand switching?” And eventually I accept that there is no clear answer to that. I hen observe that between the time I recognize non-awareness and switching hands, I actually already re-established awareness, and so “why switch hands?” I start to see lots of feelings and ideas that come with that action of switching hands, and I see that they are all changing, fleeting, can become an obsession for a second and loose importance in a second. So now it becomes a tool for observing the habits of my mind.

We can do this meditation with touch (say a stone), with sound (being aware of sounds, and touching my ear when I find I am no longer with sound but something else), as well as with sight, smell, taste, and thoughts. Smell and taste tend to be relatively neutral when we meditate (because we are not eating or walking down the market), and if we close our eyes, sight will be neutral also. There is always some sound, at least sporadically, and we do not mediate with ear plugs…

I can then do the same thing with thoughts. Just as I note that a thought came in and I a no longer with the stone, I just note “a thought” passed through the skyline of the mind, or perhaps landed somewhere. I then touch my forehead and continue. It is a way to see thoughts as more neutral than I usually do. The mind produces thoughts in the same way the tongue produces tastes, the nose smell, the skin touch, the ear sounds and the eyes, sights. I learn to treat my thoughts more gently, not “annihilating” them, but simply observing and letting go, allowing them to recede into the background.

If you jot down everything that happens in the mind, be it a body sensation, a sound, a shift in vision (say light), smell, taste or thought, you see that there is a constant flow of all of these things, they are constantly changing and exchanging. Sometimes we think that meditation means “no thinking.” I tend to disagree. No thinking, sounds a bit like “dead” to me. Meditation is about not engaging with thoughts, training myself to select my foreground and to attempt to stay with it, so it is calming the mind, not eliminate the mind all together.

I find the stone meditation to be quite useful. It has a certain sense of solidity, calming, grounding. It is especially useful when the mind is agitated, to pick up a stone and use it as a prop.