by Jason Siff
The instruction to allow your thoughts and feelings into the sitting has the view embedded in it that your mind as it is is potentially trustworthy in meditation. Meditation instructions that disallow thinking, reflection, or being open to the full range of experience usually imply a distrust of the mind. Some meditation students have expressed to me a fear of letting their minds wander too much in meditation. They fear that a wandering mind will open them up to negative thoughts, unwholesome feelings, uncontrollable urges; it may even lead to madness, depression, or demon possession (yes, I have heard that one more than once).
So, how are our minds trustworthy in meditation? That question can only be answered by having experiences of allowing thoughts and feelings into your meditation sittings and seeing for yourself if such an approach is actually trustworthy. I could try to convince you to trust your mind, but that would only lead to your trusting me about it. Trusting in something, or someone, is often a long process of getting to know a person in a variety of situations and finding that most of the time the person does things that are helpful, supportive, nurturing. It is the same with our minds in meditation. If after a period of getting to know your mind in meditation, it proves to do things that are helpful and beneficial, then it can become trustworthy.
The Concept of Dependent Arising
The most significant embedded concept in my meditation instructions, from the perspective of Dharma teaching, is “dependent arising,” which is the Buddha’s teaching that our experience is made up of causes and conditions and does not come about through a self, another being, God, or destiny. This complex teaching can be simply stated as, “When one thing arises, so does another”; nothing arises in isolation. Whatever suffering and joy we experience in our lives come about through causes and conditions, some of which we do not know. But we can begin to know more of how our thoughts and feelings are constructed by causes and conditions in our lives, and this approach to meditation helps add to our knowledge of this.
In the instruction to allow your thoughts and feelings into the meditation sitting, you are letting your inner world, and your outer life, into the meditation practice. Whatever is going on in your life will enter into your sittings, as will your customary ways of seeing yourself, others, and the world around you. Your inner world is not static either. You go from one experience to another, one feeling to another, one train of thought to another, following various associations that you make, directives that you give yourself, strategies that you devise, or you find yourself at times just receptively going with what comes up. In fact, as long as you are alive and sentient, something comes into your inner world and stays however long it will. And whatever arises is not coming up as an isolated entity but occurs in relation to other things. This is generally what dependent arising (conditions and causes) is in meditation.
But this embedded concept of dependent arising can get in the way of knowing how you actually see things if you take it as the way you must see things. For instance, if you don’t see an experience as made up of conditions but see it as self, that is perfectly all right in this approach, because that is actually how you see it. In the same vein, if you believe in God, destiny, astrology, or any other system that explains causes and conditions for you, then I suggest you explore those accustomed ways of seeing your world instead of attempting to see your experiences from the point of view of dependent arising. By doing it this way, you can learn about the dependently arisen nature of the views you already possess.
5
Inconsistencies
You might have noticed, as I have, that there is a nagging inconsistency in what I have been saying about meditation instructions and my own experience of following the breath that I told you about in the first chapter. When I began with the instruction to stay with the breath, I just stayed with it. My attention wouldn’t leave it. I could say that the way my mind was in meditation and the meditation instructions worked in harmony. That focusing on the breath all the time does work. At least, it worked for me when I first got that instruction. I just reached a point where observing my breath didn’t do anything more for me. This is not an uncommon situation for people who were able to do meditation instructions without any impediment or resistance to them but who then find themselves many years later having abandoned that practice.
There is a difference between unlearning a meditation practice you tried to do well, but couldn’t, and unlearning one that you have done in an exemplary manner. Why would anyone want to unlearn a meditation practice that works for him? You might think that there must be certain conditions at work that make someone dissatisfied, disenchanted, or disillusioned with a perfectly fine meditation practice. Or maybe it is just time to move on?
During my prime period of watching the breath, I could notice each inhalation and exhalation for an entire hour-long sitting. After a few months of trying to keep up that kind of awareness in many of my sittings, I just lost interest. Bodily sensations would periodically come and dominate my experience, and I would go with them. Awareness of sounds, especially when I got into the Mahasi Sayadaw method, would draw me in, and I would notice the differences in each bird or insect chirping, as well as the man-made sounds of engines, radios, loudspeakers, and the like.
There was a slow, gradual shift as I moved through the Mahasi method, where I began questioning its philosophy, its psychology, and its system of interpreting experiences. I stopped naming my experiences and no longer directed my attention to any prescribed object of meditation. What was left? I could always return to the natural breath.
But I could also return to my body sitting. That began to intrigue me more than the breath. It was still, inert. I could just sit knowing the experience of sitting. There was nothing for me to make out of it.
But something unexpected did start to develop: I had thoughts and feelings, not just sensations and reactions (desire and aversion). You might have wondered where my feelings had gone during all of this meditation as a Buddhist monk. My wife was a nun in India and Nepal, and it was only when I began to truly allow my thoughts and feelings into my meditation sittings and didn’t just try to note them or focus on them as sensations or breathe through them that I began to feel sorrow, loss, regret, and my own loneliness. I opened myself up to my anger, hurt, fear, and longing. I no longer believed I should not have such feelings. As I contemplated the teachings of the Buddha in Pali, I became more convinced than ever that having such feelings is essential for understanding his teaching. And sitting still with those feelings, I learned how to tolerate them and, eventually, how to quietly and gently explore them.
From this new orientation to meditation practice, observing the breath made no sense. Every time I thought of bringing my attention back to my breath I became aware that I was taking it away from a train of thought or a feeling that I needed to be with and learn how to look into. Breath meditation seemed to be in the service of my resistance to being with my feelings. It was no longer needed and was getting in the way. So attending to my breath left my practice. As did almost everything else I was formally taught.
Dropping a Meditation Practice That Doesn’t Work
It might seem that it would be a simple and straightforward matter to abandon a meditation practice that was a struggle. And that as soon as something easier, friendlier, or just plain better for you came along, you could drop the old and embrace the new. Why this doesn’t happen all that often goes to the heart of unlearning meditation. It is never a matter of simply dropping one practice and picking up a new one. There is an unlearning process to be gone through with each meditation practice we attempted to learn, even if we were not entirely committed to it.
Often when meditation instructions are given, they are given with the promise that if done correctly, you will experience a certain result. Some people are promised enlightenment, partial awakening, relief from stress or pain, greater concentration, happiness, bliss, peace of mind, an overall sense of well-being and accomplishment if they persist with the
instruction and do it faithfully, ardently, consistently, and above all, correctly, as it is taught by the teacher or the lineage of teachers within a tradition.
This puts some meditators into a serious bind. Even though they may be having difficulty doing the instruction, if they stop doing it, they feel they won’t realize the promise of the practice. They will have failed. The daily failures of not being able to do the meditation practice will pale in comparison with the monumental failure of never getting the promised outcome. Besides, everyone has heard stories of someone meditating for years and years in a certain way with no success, and then one day he gets it. All the struggle, turmoil, and pain has been of use. So it is quite common to think, “That can happen to me if I stick with this meditation practice long enough.”
You may fail to reach what the teaching promises, but in truth, it is the meditation practice that has failed as a means to realize the teaching. You may be disappointed in yourself for giving up so soon, before the goal has been reached, but how do you know that just because others supposedly have reached this goal doing a particular meditation practice that the same would happen to you? You might arrive at a similar place through another practice, and you won’t know it until you try another way. But if you keep pressing ahead with a practice that is not working, hoping that someday you will get it, then other opportunities are not tried.
Of course, there are many other factors that may keep you sticking with a practice that doesn’t work or is difficult. The meditation instructions and the results ascribed to them may make such good sense as to appear irrefutable as the only way to meditate. You may also have had experiences doing a particular practice that are encouraging, even life changing, while at the same time feeling that you’ve not been doing it correctly or well enough. There is also the factor of your faith in the teacher, the tradition, or the religion supporting you in continuing with a set of meditation instructions that you might otherwise be inclined to give up. As you can see, there are these and other reasons why you might keep doing a particular practice. What about those factors that lead to unlearning that meditation practice?
One of the most powerful factors in the process of unlearning an existing meditation practice is your willingness to look honestly at that practice and how you’ve been doing it. To do this, you can’t completely stop doing one practice and start doing another. You actually have to keep doing the one you’ve been doing. That is why I give the instruction to “meditate in the way you are accustomed to” to everyone who comes to me with an already existing meditation practice. Then I add, “You have permission also not to do that practice during the meditation sitting. You can try other meditation practices you have heard about, or you can try the beginning instructions I offer.”
With these instructions, the choice is up to you what to do at various points in the meditation sittings. So sometimes you’re meditating in your accustomed way, while at other times you can be experimenting with something different. What begins to happen is that your customary method is no longer the only way you meditate. It can be contrasted and compared with other practices you’re doing. It has been bumped out of its privileged position of the only (or best) way to meditate.
Once again we come to the role of having more choices in meditation. But the idea here is not just to learn one practice after another, building up a repertoire of meditation practices that you can trot out whenever you like in your meditation sittings. It is simpler than that. Remember, this is about unlearning meditation, not learning a whole bunch of new techniques and strategies. The choices you may notice arising within your meditation sittings have to do with where to put your attention and what intention to follow.
For example, someone who has an existing practice of watching the breath might also begin to include meditating with awareness of his body. Say he was watching the breath exclusively in his sittings over a period of a few months and had sporadic success at holding his attention squarely on his breath for several minutes at a time. The rest of the time he found himself rehashing events of the day, which was unusually unpleasant and annoying for him, as the events were often conversations where he said the wrong thing. Now, as he sits with awareness of sitting, allowing his thoughts and feelings into his meditation, he notices that whenever he begins thinking about things he has said, he has a strong intention to bring his attention to the breath. In the past, he just thought he was faithfully following the instruction to return to the breath, but now he realizes that he was using the technique of watching his breath as a way to avoid being with his regrets and worries. With that glimpse into himself and how he was using the instruction to stay with the breath, he can now make the choice when a painful memory comes up whether to stay with it, tolerate it, and learn about it or to move away from it by going to the breath. Now there is choice where before there was just habit.
Having freedom of choice in one’s meditation sittings is important for opening up meditation instructions to contrast and comparison, but it in itself cannot bring about unlearning. It is the looking into one’s meditation practice that actually paves the way for unlearning meditation.
Bridges from Other Practices
In order to move into a more unstructured meditation practice, you may need to find a bridge that leads from your existing meditation practice to meditating in a more open, receptive manner. Such bridges can undo some of the work that was accomplished in your previous meditation practice, so there is often reluctance to use them once they are found or pointed out. But without using a bridge, you can find that instead of unlearning meditation, you’ve just adopted a new practice to replace the old one, and the new one may function very much like the old one.
For example, if you’ve practiced focusing on particular sensations with the idea of feeling emotions in the body, then you may need to find a bridge to once again experience emotions in your thoughts, as you most likely did before learning that technique. Such a bridge might be found by placing your attention on the mental mood that arises with the sensation. Another bridge may be to notice the tone of voice in your thoughts and, from that, learn to pick out the emotions within your thinking process.
You may wonder why you would need to unlearn experiencing emotions as bodily sensations. There are a variety of reasons. For one, emotions, such as fear, desire, hatred, and sadness, are usually experienced with accompanying images, impressions, and thoughts. When only the physical sensations of those emotions are focused on, the mental elements of the emotional experience get obscured and lost. What then happens is that you only notice emotions when they manifest physically. Along with that comes the notion that if you can just observe the physical sensations come and go, without becoming attached to them, the concurrent emotion will diminish, vanish, or be let go of.
By turning emotions into bodily sensations, you are turning them into another form. That is, you are transforming them. At first that seems like a good idea. It simplifies your emotional world. It concretizes emotions and can be used to control them. You can more easily try to detach from the sensations or, conversely, focus on them and go into them. But are these sensations really the same thing as emotions? They may be a significant part of your emotional experience, but they are not the whole story. By gradually reversing this transmutation of emotions into bodily sensations and becoming more acquainted with the thoughts, memories, and intentions that are also part of your emotional experience, you can become aware of the whole story or, at least, as much as you can know and handle at that time.
6
Putting Meditation Experiences into Words
When you put language to a meditation experience, do you use the terminology found within your tradition or meditation community or do you use your own words? Most meditators with a formal meditation practice tend to use the words of their tradition or community. The language we use to talk about what goes on in meditation sittings is often learned. Even people who have never meditated before or who have been meditating on their own with th
e help of audio recordings or books learn a particular way of referring to their practice and the experiences they have.
The type of language used in talking about meditation experiences is often conceptual, metaphorical, and abstract. Emotions are often put into broad categories, where rage, contempt, resentment, hatred, vengeance, and the like are all called anger. Thoughts are classified in terms that inevitably convey that they do not belong in meditation: planning, monkey mind, distractions, past or future, fantasy, daydreaming, and the common expression used in instructions, mind-wandering.
In Buddhist meditation practices, particularly Vipassana meditation, there is a tendency to use the Abhidhamma (Higher Teachings) as the basis for how people should look at and talk about meditative experiences. The Abhidhamma is generally considered by scholars to have been composed a few hundred years after the Buddha’s passing. The early Abhidhamma period focuses a good deal on the language one should use in discussing the Dharma (teachings of the Buddha) and makes a contrast between the “figurative” and inexact language used by the Buddha in his discourses and the precise terminology found in the Abhidhamma texts. As Venerable U Revata states in his introduction to Bhikkhu Bodhi and Mahathera Narada’s translation of the Comprehensive Manual of Abhidhamma:
The Buddha freely employs the didactic means required to make the doctrine intelligible to his listeners. He uses simile and metaphor; he exhorts, advises, and inspires; he sizes up the inclinations and aptitudes of his audience and adjusts the presentation of the teaching so that it will awaken a positive response.
[Whereas the] Abhidhamma takes no account of the personal inclinations and cognitive capacities of the listeners; it makes no concessions to particular pragmatic requirements. It reveals the architectonics of actuality in an abstract, formalistic manner utterly devoid of literary embellishments and pedagogical expedients.