Meditate In The Marketplace

A phrase I have heard in meditation circles is 'Mediate in the marketplace'. What this means, in short, is to develop your meditation practice so that you can practise it in the presence of external distractions. The more distractions you can tolerate, the more robust your meditation becomes, and the more you can apply it in difficult times. When applied to Mental Health this is of major importance, since if the benefits of meditation abandon you when you need them the most, what is the point in practising them?

Meditation can feel nice to do. It is easier to get that nice feeling in a dark, quiet room, lit by a single candle, perhaps with a stick of incense burning. And for beginners that is a good place to start: only when you are used to a practice and have done it earnestly for a few months are you in a position to take things further, to take them out of your dark, quiet meditation space. I find meditating on a passage of text, ideally some kind of prayer or passage of scripture, to be a good practice. If you can recite, say, a chapter of the Bible or a chapter of the Dhammapada, and have practised it until you can do it reliably in your quiet meditation space, you then only need to start doing it when out and about and the habit formed earlier will lead you through perhaps a few minutes of focused mental activity. And as you do this, your capacity to focus on the object of your meditation increases, and this will in turn improve what you can achieve when sitting in silence in your dark, quiet meditation space.

And thus, 'mediate in quiet' and 'mediate in the marketplace' work in tandem, one deepening your practice, the other making robust what you have trained.