Yogi: I can watch the emotions when they are strong like aversion, but under normal conditions, I don’t know how to practice because I can only watch by feeling the emotion or the calmness.
Sayadaw: When you have no difficult emotion and the attitude is right, there is nothing more to check, take a primary object or ask yourself what the mind is aware of now? See if it picks up any of the 5 physical senses.
Stay with that and check your attitude now and again.
Yogi: Do I have to fix a specific physical object? When I sit, I don’t know what to do; I’ll try to get an object like the breath but it is very difficult for me to stay with the breath.
Sayadaw: Don’t use the breath then; use something that is easy for you. When you’re calm, what can you be aware of?
Yogi: These few days when I’m tense and cannot practice, I try to relax. Today, I try to do nothing and just let it be. I close my eyes and can begin to feel the body and my breath without doing anything. But the objects keep changing; I cannot just pay attention to one object.
Do I need to fix to one object or let the awareness go here or there?
Sayadaw: Let it go to more objects.
Yogi: I have the idea that the mind should fix onto one object to get the samadhi or calm mind.
Sayadaw: We’re not being aware to calm down – so long as the mind doesn’t have doubt, greed, and aversion, the mind will be calm. If those things are present, yes, the mind won’t be calm. But that is okay because we just have to know that.
Whether the mind is calm or not is not because of one or many objects; the mind is calm when there is no greed, anger, and delusion. When the defilements are present, the mind is not calm.