“When standing, walking, sitting, and lying down, keep your mindfulness continuous at all times. This is called practicing meditation (kammatthana) correctly. The reason why our mindfulness isn’t continuous is because we don’t do it. “Doing it” isn’t something the body does. The mind is what does it. If we do our mindfulness so that it’s continuous, so that we’re constantly aware, it’s like drops of water that flow continuously so that they become a continuous stream of water. If you can train the mind in this way, your meditation will progress quickly and well.

But these days, people go practice vipassana for three days, seven days, ten days, fifteen days, and then they come out of retreat. They say that they’ve already done vipassana and they’re already good at it. So they go to sing and dance and play around. When that happens, their vipassana is gone and they don’t have any left. When they do all kinds of unskillful things that stir up the heart and damage it like this, you can’t call it “practice.” It’s a mode of practice like planting a tree where you plant it today and then, in three days’ time, you pull it up and plant it over there. Then, after another three days, you pull it up again. The tree is going to die and you won’t get to eat the fruit.

Meditation can die in just the same way.”