"You’re working on a skill. Try to think back to whatever manual skills you’ve developed — carpentry, sports, cooking skills, whatever — and the attitude you had to foster to help master the skill.
If there’s a mistake, you don’t let yourself get upset by the mistake. Just start all over again. When things turn out well, don’t let yourself be complacent. Try to think of other ways to improve what you’ve done. Or if it can’t be improved, learn how not to mess with it, how to keep it going as it is.
There’s a certain balance, a certain maturity that you have to bring to any skill. That’s the kind of attitude you want to bring to the meditation. If you let yourself get too easily discouraged by bad sessions in the meditation or start getting complacent or cocksure about your good sessions, you’re setting yourself up for a fall, and no skill is going to come from that. You want to keep at it, keep at it, keep at it. Whatever mistakes there are, you learn from them.
Whenever things go well, you try to learn from them. If you come out of a good meditation session, don’t leave it immediately. Reflect on what you did this time, what went right this time. And the more often you do that, the more precise your observation’s going to be, the more you start seeing cause and effect as they operate in the mind."
~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Basic Medicine"
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