"The Buddha" recommended various remedies and techniques of mental concentration, each one tailored to the different people who came to him for guidance.

But since most of us cannot go to some Buddha, what we are advised to do is use the same method the Buddha himself used.

Which is to say: concentration on the breath.

This stage is Samadhi, concentration for the control and training of your mind.

To continue practicing on our own, the advice is to always try to do it somewhere quiet, with little or no distraction. It becomes much easier that way.

We should never think of this as a breathing exercise, because it isn't one. It is an exercise in staying concentrated while remaining conscious.

As meditators, we have to admit how difficult this turns out to be. The moment we try to keep our attention on the breath, we start worrying about the pain in our legs, and the moment we try to push away every distraction, a million things flood the mind, as I mentioned kept happening to me. Things like memories, plans, desires, fears.

Some of these things will snag our attention, and we'll realize we've forgotten the breath entirely.

We'll refocus, and the whole sequence will repeat itself, because the training is not easy. The mind has to be tamed.

This will make us see just how little control we have over these minds of ours. We'll be like spoiled children reaching for a toy they grow bored with immediately and then grabbing another.

That is the habit our mind has settled into, what it has been doing our entire lives. But once we begin to investigate our true nature, this constant leaping about has to stop. We must change this pattern of behavior and replace it with a steady awareness of reality, then hold onto it.

So we will keep failing and trying again, always working to stay calm, without tension, without frustration when things don't go as hoped.

We have to approach it this way because the opposite habit is one we've been feeding our whole lives, which is exactly why it won't be easy to uproot. Only through continuous repetition will we manage to sustain this awareness of reality. That is the right way.

Our suffering comes from ignorance. We react the way we do because we don't know our own reality. The mind spends most of its time lost in fantasies and unrealities of its own making, reliving pleasant and unpleasant experiences, anticipating the future with rage or with fear.

And in doing so we lose the moment we are actually living, because we cannot live in the past, it is already gone. Nor in the future, which lies beyond anything we can reach right now.

If we keep ignoring our present actions, we are condemned to repeat the same mistakes of the past and we will never succeed in reaching our future dreams.

But if we learn to stay alert and attentive to our present moment, we can use the past as a guide toward the future and actually achieve our goals.

Dhamma is the path of the here and now. Anapana-sati means: mindful of the breath.

Another reason to keep developing our attention on the breath is the desire to experience ultimate reality. By focusing on it, we will explore things about ourselves that we don't yet know and bring them from unconsciousness into consciousness, because the breath functions whether we are conscious or not.

We can make our breath take different forms and even hold it for a period of time, but even when we decide to stop controlling it, it will continue without any effort from us.

While all of this is happening, once we are able to work with the breath, we will begin to focus on the top of our head and move slowly down the body, in order, trying not to skip any part. We travel through the face, arms, hands, chest, back, neck, legs, feet, and so on. If we skip something, we go back to that point. Then we continue from the bottom back up. It isn't a matter of going fast or excruciatingly slow, just taking a relaxed amount of time so that no part goes unvisited in the mind.

As we do this, we will feel different sensations in different parts of the body, and when that happens, we go there and we don't force them to end or to last, we simply observe them. We watch how they come and disappear. Sometimes they'll appear in several places at once and we must not lose our calm. We know these are Sankharas (the reaction of the conditioned mind).

When we stop feeling these Sankharas, we continue with the exercise again and again until it becomes something we do systematically.

"The Buddha" described four types of right effort:

- Preventing evil and unwholesome or unhealthy states from arising.

- Abandoning them if they do arise.

- Generating wholesome states that do not yet exist.

- Maintaining them without fail, allowing them to develop and reach full growth and perfection.

Remember that I am not a Vipassana teacher and I am only sharing my experiences and basic knowledge of this practice. I have only been through one ten-day course.

For writing out the steps in technically precise terms, I am drawing on a book I bought after the course, one I highly recommend.

I don't think there's a Spanish translation, though I'm not entirely sure, because here in Asia it seems like no one has ever seen one.

The book is called: "The Art of Living," written by S.N. Goenka.