Meditation has been getting a very good rap lately. Very good. Scientists have proven that it actually makes you happier. It is included in mental health programs. It is being taught at gyms, schools and in the workplace. It has stopped being associated with gurus, swamis, or anyone who wears robes to work. Somehow it has become acceptable and not scary. This is wonderful. But it has also made for some misconceptions.
I've been practicing meditation for 15 years and my main knowledge of these misconceptions comes from holding them myself and refusing to let them go because they just seemed so ... convenient.
I've also been teaching meditation for four years. Between my own pigheadedness and that of my students, I've had ample opportunity to observe these misconceptions from close range.
There seem to be three primary ones.
1. Meditation means you have to stop thinking.
No, no, no! This is a crazy hoax.
If I had a dollar for everyone who said to me, "I can't meditate! I can't turn off my thoughts!" I'd be, well, richer. Many people think that emptying the mind of thought is the point and if you can't do so, you've failed.
Not so.
Your mind exists to produce thought. That's what it does. It thinks things. Getting it to stop is akin to opening your eyes and telling them not to see anything.
Go ahead. Try that right now. Look out through your eyes and plead with them not to see anything. Try really hard.
That's how frustrating it is to think you're supposed to hop off the 190-mile an hour freight train in your head and onto a meditation cushion where you will somehow have magically stopped dead on the track.
Instead, the idea is to relax with your thoughts exactly as they are. This turns out to be far more relaxing than fighting them off.
Meditation has nothing to do with stopping thought, but everything to do with not going along for the ride. You hop off the train, but you don't stand it front of it, hands held out insisting it stop, whereupon you get shmushed like a bug on a windshield. Instead, you have a seat on the grass and watch it roll by. Trains keep coming, but eventually each fades from view. They all pass by. You don't have to do anything to make this happen. So don't get all hung up on stopping thought. I promise, your mind will slow down on its own.
If you'd like to try it, instruction is here.
2. Meditation turns you into a peaceful person who is unruffled by anything.
Oh my god, you have no idea how much I wish this was true. It just doesn't work that way. Instead of making you untouchable, meditation makes you like the most touchable person ever.
However, it does indeed pacify your mind, not by weeding out the bad thoughts and keeping the good ones (as encouraged by the thought police), but by noticing both and not necessarily believing either one. Freed from absorption in thought, you can open to what is actually happening. Into this opening come all sorts of things, wanted and unwanted, including all your good feelings and all your icky ones, and, notably, the joy and suffering of others. The more you practice, the more open you become. The more open you become, the more you feel. The more you feel, the more vulnerable you are.
Meditation actually cultivates vulnerability, not impenetrability--and it is right here that all the goodies reside, although it might not feel that way at first.
Once, I asked my teacher, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, what was up with all the crying that had been accompanying my practice of late. In fact, I said, the more I practiced, the more I cried. The suffering of my fellow humans seemed untenable. What was I doing wrong? Surely this couldn't be what the Buddha intended as the path to enlightenment or a helpful gift I could offer others. When it came to empathy and care for my fellow humans, wiping my nose on their sleeves did not seem like the best I could do.
He looked at me so kindly and said, "You know, some of the worlds greatest meditators have cried a lot."
This simple answer was so liberating. I thought of the world's meditation masters and sages, like the Buddha, like Jesus, like Gandhi and tried to picture them, not as implacable adepts who always knew what to do and say, but as human beings who cried--under the Bodhi Tree, atop the Mount of Olives, in a prison cell--for all of us. But then what? They didn't just wipe their eyes and return to their lives, hoping for the best. Somehow they were left with a greater capacity for love, not less.
I wanted to get me some of that.
The profound opening that is the result of a strong and steady practice--and which includes deep, painful emotions as well as boring and joyful ones--actually creates the perfect circumstances for you to become a more truthful version of who you already are. This you can open to joy, outrage, boredom, terror and love without losing her seat. Occasionally, she is completely at peace, but she knows that it is not the result of using meditation to withdraw from this world, but to fearlessly enter it, take it on completely and stabilize her heart in the open state.
3. Meditation is a means of self-improvement and stress reduction.
It is absolutely true that meditation brings positive change to your sense of self, relationships and quality of life. It has also been scientifically shown to make you happier (by increasing activity in the prefrontal cortex) and relieve stress (by reducing cortisol.)
However, meditation is so much more than this. In fact, its greatest benefits are realized when attempts at self-improvement are abandoned in favor of accepting yourself. Pema Chodron once said that cultivating gentleness toward yourself is the single most important aspect of meditation practice. When you draw attention away from the inner chatter that is usually grading you for everything on a scale of one to 10, you make space for another kind of awareness to arise: your own natural, complete and indestructible wisdom. This is a guarantee.
Through meditation, you tune into your life rather than your thoughts about your life. You see that it has an arc, rhyme and pattern. In fact, your life has a life of its own and you are its guardian, not its master. Your unique path, the one that reveals to you who you really are, appears. You can see it. You can feel it. There is a sense of definitely being in the right place.
Ultimately, meditation is nothing more or less than the path to enlightenment. That it also happens to be an astonishingly effective way to like yourself more and accomplish your goals is peripheral. Using it solely as a means to conventional ends robs it of its elegance and power--and you miss the verdant and fertile forest that exists in the unending now for trees that have yet to flower.
(Thus have I heard.)
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But what I really wanted to point out is that the different traditions' formal methods, when applied by principled practitioners (I mean not in just some triffling way) really do have measurably different effects. I mean in terms of physiological responses to stimulus. (Not sure I'd want to get into quibbling about superiority / inferiority.) One thing for sure, as you've pointed out, this ain't smoke and mirrors!
Fifth misconception: Meditation is superior to taking a siesta, nap, or time out during the day.
(I paid $400.00 for my mantra in the 90's. I've learned with use and non-use, an hour in the sun in a relaxed position, or a brief sleeping period leave me equally refreshed).
Transcendental Meditation being only ONE of of them.
Please note, my secret mantra is now listed for sale on Ebay.
I am sorry you are unhappy with your meditation. This can happen if a person somehow starts practicing the technique incorrectly. It is easy to remedy. There is a life-time of free follow up once you pay your initial course fee. Any certified teacher will take hours of their time, without any pay, to meet with you and help refresh your practice and understanding of this effortless technique. That is one of the reasons there is an initial fee, so that you feel free to take advantage of the follow up at any TM center. I have helped many lapsed meditators, coming from other cities, offering them free refresher courses to help them get back into their practice without charging them anything for my time. They always love meditating again once they are reminded of the simple instructions and have all their questions answered. It's a non-profit organization and most of your original course fee went to helping those who are less fortunate learn for free. It is so much deeper than a nap when it is practiced correctly. Hope you don't give up. Peace.
Or you could try the instructions for meditation given in this article and see if you like it better.
During the five year period I lived in Las Vegas, I attended the Mediation Center for seaonal solstice, and group meditation.
"Anything found to boost healthy living," ... I advocate. What, "works for me today," is 30 minutes in the sun, breathing evenly and feeling the experience.
In my own experience meditation can be complicated or simple and still be effective.
I especially liked the part about not grading myself. And being gentle with my less-than-perfect self.
BTW, you're the first person I'm following on Twitter. I really don't know how to use Twitter so I think you would be a good person to follow for a start. ;-)
I think the research you mention was actually done on transcendental meditation which is very different from the meditation you describe. During this effortless technique a person transcends all thinking and emotion and experiences a state of inner peace, happiness and universality. Science has found that TM not only increases activity in the prefrontal cortex, but also produces widespread alpha coherence indicating a state of restful-alertness. [2] There is also reduction of cortisol, blood lactate, hypertension, anxiety and depression. Science is correcting the misconception that all meditation practices are same.
1. Mindfulness: Occipital gamma activation during Vipassana
meditation, Department of Psychiatry, University of California, San
Diego, La Jolla, CA.
2, Reference: Human Physiology 25: 171–180, 1999.
In 2001, at the Mind & LIfe IX meeting at Madison, Wisconsin, Richard Davidson, Matthieu Ricard, and Antoine Lutz began a research study imaging the brains of Tibetan Monks while they were meditating.
The first paper reporting the results of that study was just published in the November 16 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The article is titled "Long-Term Meditators Self-Induce High-Amplitude Gamma Synchrony During Mental Practice."
Article abstract:
Practitioners understand "meditation," or mental training, to be a process of familiarization with one's own mental life leading to long-lasting changes in cognition and emotion. Little is known about this process and its impact on the brain. Here we find that long-term Buddhist practitioners self-induce sustained electroencephalographic high-amplitude gamma-band oscillations and phase-synchrony during meditation.
These electroencephalogram patterns differ from those of controls, in particular over lateral frontoparietal electrodes. In addition, the ratio of gamma-band activity (25-42 Hz) to slow oscillatory activity (4-13 Hz) is initially higher in the resting baseline before meditation for the practitioners than the controls over medial frontoparietal electrodes. This difference increases sharply during meditation over most of the scalp electrodes and remains higher than the initial baseline in the post-meditation baseline. These data suggest that mental training involves temporal integrative mechanisms and may induce short-term and long-term neural changes.
I'd like to urge all meditation teachers to familiarize themselves with the available research. You can find it on pubmed.org. We need to make sure we correctly attribute findings with the actual technique being studied, because different techniques produce different results. Good luck with your efforts. Peace.
You have a knack for making difficult concepts easy to understand; I will definitely check out some of your books.
Peace and love!
very helpful and truthful-
Deb and I recently wrote a book on meditation
BE THE CHANGE
How Meditation Can Transform You and the World
we share many similar views
Joyfully
Ed
Appreciated your post about fear, and your approach to turning into wisdom. I tried to take a similar view in my book, "How Not to Be Afraid of Your Own Life" which is really a book about meditation. At least, to me.
Hope our paths will cross at some point!
I think that there are a couple important things to know about Meditation, Susan covered them too.
You need nothing special, you just need yo. Simply stop, me still, breathe, and let your mind do what it will, when you notice yourself paying attention to your mind, simply focus instead on your breath. When you find yourself again, watching your mind, simply refocus on your breath.
Each time you do this, it will be a different moment, and the mind will be off to a million different things to consider, but all you need to do is stop and breathe. All those things the mind is of and going about are all the freight trains Susan spoke of, just let them go by, because see, you stopped, you got off the trains. You are now observing that they are going by, but not what is loaded on the cars.
It is almost too simple and that is where we falter on this, because we think it cant be. We think meditation is doing, and actually it is more at not doing, with the focus on your breath. It takes nothing other than to be where you are. Simply just stop for a rest, let go of your mind, refocus and refocus on your breath. There is nothing to attain other than practice, and it is all for you.
Thanks Susan, I appreciate your efforts.
When you say, "thought police," I wonder if you're referring to folks like me. I do encourage people to think positively and to avoid wallowing in self-pity. Call me new age, but I do believe in the Law of Attraction. If you have a few moments, I'd be very interested in your thoughts on my most recent post, about this very topic:
http://dustinrasener.com/blog/2010/05/29/false-positivity/
Thanks in advance, and great article! Keep it up.
The world is just so much bigger than that.
Here’s a quote from translator (of the Tao Te Ching, the Bhagavad Gita, and more) Stephen Mitchell in answer to a question I asked him: Do any of the world's wisdom traditions tell you that you can you make good things happen by thinking positive thoughts?" I mean, this is a guy who has studied all these traditions inside and and out.*
"The teaching of every one of the great sacred texts is that control is an illusion. When you understand that ultimately you are not the doer, you can step back from yourself. That is the only path to serenity. In other words, letting go of the illusion of control, and realizing that you never had it in the first place, allows you to live in the most dazzlingly intelligent, beautiful, and kind reality that you could ever have imagined—and beyond what you could have imagined."
*A full discussion of this point of view is in my book, "The Wisdom of a Broken Heart"
The adept goes to the gates and watches very carefully for many days. He does not succeed in finding the one he was seeking. Returning to his Master, crestfallen, he admits he did not find the One. His master asks him to relate what he noticed most at the Gate. He says he noticed the cruelty of the guards, and the
He says he most certainly noticed the cruelty of those guarding the gates. One man, dressed in clean but old and patched clothing, came daily to the gates with a load of firewood on his back to sell within the walls.
Each day the guards ridiculed the poor wood cutter, smirking at him, ridiculing him and denying him access to the gates for no apparent reason except their sadistic amusement. The man took this placidly and with equinimity turned and left each day, returning each following day at the same time to repeat the cycle. The master said, "But my son! Now listen to your heart. That man was the One I told you about. He is the One who knows the 100th secret name of God."
I first tried meditation nearly forty years ago, expecting to go into a place of quiet peace and calm. Silly me. I was almost instantly engulfed in a limitless void. Not knowing at the time that such a place even existed, I found the experience to be rather unsettling to say the least. It put me off the whole thing for quite a long time after.
Since then I've experienced spontaneous shifts into bliss from non-meditative states, just thinking outside the box, and learned the importance of no-thought to maintaining that state. It sounds paradoxical but as soon as the blissful shift occurs all thought ceases. Bliss ends when thought returns.
Thank you for shedding light on the misconceptions.
If you haven't seen it already, check out neuroscientist Dr Jill Bolte-Taylor's description of her powerful experience in consciousness when her left brain shut down due to a stroke:
http://mind-body-spirit-central.com/articles/enlightenment/articles/stroke-of-insight-01.php