We take life so seriously. I always stress the importance of feeling light, of being playful and having the ability to laugh at life and ourselves. That is a really important spiritual quality!
One day I was talking to a very wise monk in Sri Lanka who lives in a forest hermitage. Suddenly he told me: "Sometimes I see life as a big joke. Sometimes it can be a very bad joke! But still it's a joke." Our problem is that we take this joke too seriously. We take this life as something that should be perfect. With that we loose this lightness and playfulness in our attitude to life and in our attitude to practice.
This idea about playfulness came to me one day when in Sri Lanka I was asked to teach meditation to a group of young Buddhist monks. They were around fifteen years old, wearing robes and living in a temple. Before we talked about meditation I had a friendly chat with them and I asked them: "What is it that you don't like in this temple, and in the schedule?" They said: "Getting up in the morning for meditation." I said: "I'm very happy, it is a very honest answer! Now tell me, what is it that you enjoy in this temple?" Everyone gave big smiles and they said: "Playing with the dogs!" Then I said immediately: "Well, you see, meditation is playing with your mind!" They liked this very much. I met some of them later on and they said that the meditation had become very light, especially focusing on breathing. They said that it was like playing with the breath: sometimes it is there, sometimes it is not there. So then there was a lightness to the practice.
So please realise our progress is in how we are relating in everyday life. It is a way of living. It is an art of living. It is a way of thinking. It is a matter of having a certain attitude towards life. So please see this clearly, please realise this.. Please don't associate meditation only with a particular posture, a particular time, a particular technique.
In the Buddhist tradition there are two aspects to meditation: one is called calm, tranquility, and the other is Vipassana or developing insight and wisdom. In developing calmness and tranquility, I would say that this is like polishing the dust off the mirror. This is what we do by practising with an object like breathing, where with the help of our friend the breath we learn to develop some calmness, some tranquility, some space, clarity and awareness. And when the dust is not there the mirror reflects things just as they are.