Imagine that you own a home someplace where it is constantly raining – this part of the world has a monsoon season all year round. And, your home has a room that is a few feet lower than the rest of the house, say down half a flight of stairs. There’s unfortunately a huge hole in the roof over this particular room, so, with all the rain, it regularly becomes flooded.
What would the ultimate solution to this problem be? It would be to fix the hole on the roof in that room, of course. But the roof over this room unfortunately cannot be accessed from the outside, only from the inside. To make matters worse, the room is constantly so flooded that it’s basically impossible to walk through to even to get a ladder to the area under the hole. So, your first step towards fixing the problem would be to pump some water out of the room so that it’s minimally passable. When the water reaches a low enough level that you can walk a ladder in, a little work on repairing the roof becomes possible.
But, since it is constantly raining, the next time you come back to work on fixed the roof a few days later, the room is flooded again. So, you bail it out as best you can, and when the room is passable, you fix a little bit more of the roof. This process goes on over months and years.
This metaphor is helpful towards understanding what meditation technique to choose to do during a certain sitting period. Symbolically, the hole in the roof stands for frictions and tangles of mind and soul that stop us from being a happy person. The rain is the difficult challenges that life throws at us. And the water inside the room is our suffering and distress, specifically agitation and instability of mind.
Draining the water out of the room is doing mechanical meditation techniques that help the mind to be more concentrated, focused, settled, stable, and simplified. And repairing the roof is doing so-called insight practice, meditations that take that concentrated mind and use it to explore the deep texture of reality exactly as it is, inside of a wider field of awareness.
So, the basic idea for choosing a meditation technique is: let’s fix the roof when we are able – let’s meditate by noticing reality’s exact shape, whenever we are able, since that is what helps us to be a free, clear, and untangled person – it is the long-term, stable, and thorough solution to our suffering. But, as we travel along this path, we’re probably regularly going to have to bail water and prepare the groundwork by using concentration techniques to develop a mind that is settled and stable enough to do our insight practices.