Developing a meditation practice can seem daunting, especially at the beginning, when we’re unsure about what having a meditation practice even means. It took me awhile to find a sense of confidence in what I was doing; perhaps more important than the confidence, though, was learning how to be comfortable.

My first teacher, a Sikkimese Buddhist nun, once likened the development of a meditation practice to being an expectant mother. “Now that you’ve taken the time to begin this process,” she explained, “you must learn to take care of and protect your practice, to nurture it, and to maintain the necessary conditions for its growth. You should think of yourself as pregnant—you need to apply that same level of care.” Even at that early stage, her advice made immediate practical sense. And now, two decades later, her words resound with a wisdom that captures the way in which maintaining a practice becomes a life’s work.

The 12th-century Tibetan meditation teacher Gampopa suggested in his work “The Precious Garland of the Supreme Path” that when our practice begins to coalesce we ought to protect it as we would our own eyes. It is during this embryonic stage of practice that we experience moments of vulnerability and tenderness, ripe with the potential to develop a deeper connection to practice.

When I was at this stage in developing my practice, I was introduced to a meditation instruction known as Tilopa’s Six Nails. Tilopa was a mahasiddha, a great adept, who likely lived in the region of present-day West Bengal, India, and Bangladesh around the turn of the 11th century. Little is known about his life, but traditional biographies tell us that he was a cowherd and showed a natural inclination for meditation and mystical experiences. Over the course of his life he became a very experienced meditator with a profound understanding of the mind. Like many of the other famed mahasiddhas from the Indian subcontinent, Tilopa was instrumental in creating and refining core spiritual practices that later spread throughout the Himalayan region—the Six Nails teaching, also known as Tilopa’s Six Words of Advice, is one of his best-known instructions:

Don’t recall. Let go of what has passed.
Don’t imagine. Let go of what may come.
Don’t think. Let go of what is happening now.
Don’t examine. Don’t try to figure anything out.
Don’t control. Don’t try to make anything happen.
Rest. Relax, right now, and rest.

—trans. Ken McLeod