In a quiet place, darker than it is light.  I need silence, and since silence is so rare, I manufacture silence with headphones.  To increase the silence I will play music that assists me in meditation: Tibetan singing bowls, for example; more recently an Italian album of Musica Tipica Giapponese.  I recognize that one should be able to meditate anywhere, in any conditions, but I’m nowhere near such levels of inner stillness as yet.

To me, sitting cross-legged is crucial.  Double hip replacements have allowed me to return to sitting cross-legged recently, and the effect on my meditation is strong.  I think the position of the meditator should involve discipline and some discomfort at first, but I see no spiritual value in genuine pain.  Hence I do not attempt the lotus or half-lotus.

I meditate for about twenty minutes.  I count time only by my breaths; sixty good breaths, with rest between, take twenty minutes or a little more.  Above all, I want these good breaths.  Slow, full-lunged, easy, unthinking.  They are not just physical in the well-being they release and exemplify.

I do not concentrate on anything verbal—no koans on my mind.  If I “concentrate on” anything at all it might be a certain vague visual image of the Tao.  Distracting thoughts arise constantly.  With guidance from many masters in my books, I have learned that the attempt, the very wish, to stop them will only strengthen them.

I’ve had no teachers and have attended no meditation halls.  All I have learned and all that guides me has come from my books.  If I believed fully in satori I might take up these other routes to it.  What I do believe in, and what I have been blessed with now and then, is the moment of perfect, utter stillness in the mind and the body.  Really, I’m not after much more than that.  It is rare enough.