We begin by making a distinction between the moving and the still. Seated, with eyes closed, I ask you to show a preference for the still while allowing the moving (thoughts, feelings, breathing) to continue uninterrupted. What you will readily know as the still will initially be external physical contact, which will be felt at certain contact points. You can start with either one of these:
Showing preference is simply the intention to prefer the stillness of the contact points while allowing your thoughts and feelings to come, to stay, and to leave on their own. It is essentially showing preference for being with the experience of your body sitting still, even though your mind may only be drawn into that stillness for a few seconds at a time. Even as you show preference for the stillness of your body sitting, your thoughts and feelings may continue to occupy much of your attention, and that is just what you are experiencing and need not be changed.
Following these instructions, you may experience lengthy periods of your mind being very active, making it difficult for you stay with the contact points for even a few seconds. You may wonder if sitting with all this mental chatter is really meditating; I assure you, it is. We cannot force our minds to be still, for that will just create more agitation, tension, aggression, and self-dislike. In this path of gaining greater peace and tranquility, we use peaceful means from the very beginning.
Along with the instruction to show preference for the stillness of the body as you sit, I usually suggest that people become conscious of their expectations and ideas about meditation, and be willing to learn what it is like to sit without any goal, objective, or purpose in mind. Just allow the meditation process itself to unfold without trying to control or judge it, though attempts to control and judgments about what is happening will occur. There is no way to do this practice wrong, except by constantly trying to control your meditation experience instead of letting it be just what it is. Through this approach you will learn a natural way of being in your experience but not entirely of it, and in time you will develop a wider range of inner experience, a capacity to tolerate whatever arises in your mind, and a more extensive awareness of the conditioned nature of your world.
In the past I would recommend recollecting meditation experiences during the meditation sitting. I have seen that this is not such a good way to begin, as it can create a certain amount of pressure and tension to interrupt what is going on in a sitting in order to recall what just happened. Instead, I suggest that you just allow your meditation sittings to follow their own course as much as possible, without prescribed interference, and then recollect the meditation sitting afterwards.
After each meditation sitting, take a few moments to silently recollect what went on during the meditation sitting. Start by recalling what is easy to recall and then try to recall other parts of the sitting which are more difficult to bring back to mind. A good deal of each meditation sitting may be impossible to retrieve afterwards, so be satisfied with a simple recollection of what you truly remember. Also, in the recollection, accuracy is not as important as honesty. (By that I mean accurately recalling details is not as important as getting an “honest picture” of what went on.)
To aid in this process of recollection, you might want to take the time to write down what you remember of a meditation sitting in a journal.