Unlearning Meditation: What to Do When the Instructions Get in the Way

by Jason Siff

  I get the sense from this entry that Cliff is using three different techniques in his sitting. One is awareness of the breath as sensations around his abdomen and chest. It is a practice he dwells on doing correctly. The second is a way of noticing who is doing the noticing, which is a practice of trying to be aware of awareness or knowing knowing. The third practice he uses is stated at the end: allowing thoughts and feelings to arise naturally and run their course—essentially the instruction I gave him. Each of these three practices has its own rules, concepts, values, and beliefs, and though it may seem like they can be integrated into one practice by putting them into a sequence or using them as strategies, in actual practice they contradict each other. Awareness of breathing comes with a different set of rules than allowing thoughts and feelings does. Noticing the observer of one’s experience requires the concentration that would otherwise be put on the breath, and such concentration would not be conducive to a more open and receptive way of being in meditation. No wonder Cliff encountered confusion. But instead of seeing how the confusion was an important aspect of his impasse, he treated it as something to pacify and get beyond.

  Day three: I began meditation sitting in cross-legged position after lighting a candle. By the end of the meditation, my legs are usually asleep, but that happened with less intensity today. Worried today that I wasn’t spending time with awareness of bodily sensations, i.e., feelings in legs, abdomen, and chest. Thought about a conversation I had with a buddy over dinner and then noticed the thinking, and then the thoughts seemed to dissolve. Then thought about a conversation with a woman I am meeting for the first time (for dating). When I think about stuff like this without being aware that I am thinking, I judge myself for not noticing. Then I try to be gentle and then I feel afraid for being too gentle, like I will lose myself if I am not judging. A few times I became briefly restless, but the feeling of restlessness passed. I did not pay much attention to my breathing for the rest of the time. Meditation seemed to pass quickly and ended smoothly. I was surprised how quickly the time went by. Felt slightly disappointed that I did not have some kind of profound experience.

  Cliff’s description of this sitting hints at a subtle shift in his practice. He doesn’t pay much attention to his breathing and lets himself think about things without noticing that he is thinking about them. He knows he has broken some rule about being aware of each thought, for that also seems to be a practice he has done. He judges himself for it. When he is then gentle with himself, he feels he will lose himself if he is not judging. Could his impasse also have an aspect to it of being afraid of losing a part of himself that judges?

  Day five (skipping over day four): Began sitting with feelings of frustration because I don’t know how to do this meditation. Began noticing chest and abdominal breathing. Kept thinking about frustration again. Judged myself for thinking again. Then remembering to be gentle and accepting of thinking. Then beat myself up for forgetting to be gentle. Noticed I was gentle on myself and then became afraid I was doing it wrong. Very scary to not think or to allow myself to think gently. Feel more comfortable judging. When I judge, I know who I am. I kept going back to noticing who was thinking, which launches me into new streams of thinking. Noticed again how scary it is to be gentle with myself. When I think, I am afraid that in the gentleness I lose myself. Even writing this I feel frustration. I am not doing this right. Had many thoughts about what to remember to write when the meditation ended. Overriding thought is that when I judge myself for thinking, I know who I am. When I am gentle on me, I feel scared because I don’t know who I am. The lack of judgment feels ungrounded, like it “can’t be right.” I’m not really aware of a transition period. I just try to be gentle. The focus of thoughts is about being gentle. I still am averse to thinking even when I am trying to be gentle. Did not pay more attention to breathing because I decided that was not what I was supposed to be doing during meditation. I am supposed to notice thoughts. Paying attention to chest and abdominal breathing feels too easy and peaceful. I sort of decided I need to stay with noticing thoughts, which is more difficult and takes work. Meditation ended with left leg aching because it fell asleep. I was ready to have meditation end.

  In this sitting Cliff is more actively “doing” my approach to meditation, holding on to the instruction to be gentle with his experience. It has the unanticipated effect of producing fear and a loss of self. But it is also showing him that he is strongly identified with judging. The impasse comes into clearer focus: the meditator self is also a judging self. He is afraid to be gentle, to be open and allowing. He is identified with that part of himself that is harsh, critical, and judgmental.

  Just consider that predicament for a little while. I am sure it is a familiar one for some of you. Those of you who have been caught in this impasse probably have not found an “obvious” escape.

  Any meditation instruction that is taken up, even for a few minutes, will probably have some harshness in it. Trying to be gentle would probably be done harshly, with force. Trying to do any meditation practice will set Cliff up for failure, for even if he does it well for a while, there will be times when he can’t do it all that well. If he is told a particular strategy to apply, it will turn into something that will be judged. In short, there is nothing for him to do, for by doing anything, he is stepping into a situation where he will judge himself.

  Does this sound like an impasse to you? It does to me. If I were Cliff’s teacher, which I was at the time of this journal, I would have to pause and reflect on the overall situation. So I am pausing now to reflect a moment. As I do, I am reminded of something a longtime student once said about her experiences of judging. Her judgments were like snapping turtles. Each time she thought about a particular person or a certain situation, the attitude underneath the judging looked like snapping turtles. It seemed so automatic to her. A memory would appear, a snap judgment would follow. She continued to sit thinking and snapping at the people in her thoughts. She would even catch herself snapping at herself on occasion. How did this clear up for her? She just kept observing this process repeat itself and started to find it interesting. Once she really understood how judging worked, she was able to unlearn it. Not completely, but enough for it not to be such a big impasse anymore.

  Just knowing how something operates in the moment may not be enough to dislodge the impasse. It is a common view in meditation circles that you don’t need to know the history of something that arises—all you need to do is be with the present-moment experience of it. What I see is that we need to know both: the present manifestation and the past memory.

  Exploring the past often feels too psychological for many students. That is, it seems to be a way to build more stories and feed more beliefs around the experience. Take judging, for example. Your personal history of it would have to include your parents, your teachers, friends, and enemies. It would have to include traumatic experiences of being judged and punished, as well as chronic situations where you felt inferior and under the watchful gaze of a judging authority figure. You might reexperience dimly remembered episodes of being shamed, of being rejected, of being teased, and of not getting it right. This exposure to your past would be uncomfortable, and it might bring to the surface pain that you don’t have the time or inclination to deal with right now. That is all right. You don’t need to push yourself to go there.

  Still, the past can be explored as it comes up naturally. To do this you need to let random memories come into the sitting and hold off making sense out of them or interpreting them. Instead, let yourself reexperience the past events, or the feelings that come up with those memories, and do nothing with them. The memories may not fit into the theme or issues you are looking at, so you don’t need to try to force a fit. After a while of sitting with memories, they will dissipate, disappear, or open up into an area to explore, as in this meditation sitting a student sent me recently.

  I had an interesting sit last night. As you know, I have been struggling with the pain o
f loneliness for months, since I moved away from my wife and children on account of work. Last night, in a lengthy sit (of about two hours), I was face-to-face with my feelings of loneliness with an unprecedented degree of clarity. I experienced a series of hurtful memories and imagined scenarios involving suffering due to separation from my loved ones. Some memories were recent, others from my teens, and yet others from my early childhood. Almost all the memories and fantasies were about the same theme—not being able to “have” my loved ones. I had thoughts related to my parents, close relatives, friends, ex-lovers, my partner, and my children. Some of the most compelling memories/fantasies were with respect to an ex-lover, who despite a very strong, passionate connection between us in the past, chose not to live with me and rejected my marriage proposal. In last night’s sit, I again felt rejected, abandoned, insulted, alone, angry, jealous of another person who “has” my lover who I should have “had.” As with almost all sits, this sit was not all linear or cleanly laid out in coherent stories. Rather, it was more like short stories—configurations of thoughts, memories, imagined future scenarios mixed with anger at times, hurt at other times. These stories would come and go. There were periods of calm, and then another story would rise again. Sometimes I had work-related thoughts, but they were sparse. Sometimes I would be deeply absorbed in a dynamic interior space. But the sit was mostly about stories related to not “having” my loved ones. What’s striking is that while all of the drama was going on, I understood that all of these seemingly compelling stories were merely reflections or constructions of my own mind. I had a whole new point of view from which I saw this current of hurtful experiences flowing together, coloring each other, incorporating or reconstructing memories since my childhood. Until last night, there had been a lingering undercurrent of something that I had been labeling as “loneliness.” This was no longer present. I ended the sit after the stories completely subsided and went to bed. I slept like a baby afterward. When I woke up this morning, the unrest of “loneliness” was not there, as it is most mornings.

  11

  A Partially Cleared Impasse

  Yesterday evening, a friend of ours plowed the snow behind our Toyota 4Runner. Unfortunately, we didn’t know about it until this evening, when it was too late to dig out the remainder of the car. Besides, it had begun to snow again. Our friend had anticipated that we would go up to the car and see that the snow had been plowed. When our dog was alive, we would take daily walks, even in heavy snow, as he loved the snow. But since he passed away, we have been taking fewer walks and try not to walk much outdoors after the snow has frozen, for it is too slippery. I had thought of going up to the car around noon when I was outside collecting firewood, because I noticed a small John Deere used for snowplowing at a neighbor’s house and had thought of asking the person to plow my driveway, but then I decided not to. If I had, I would have discovered that the berm behind our car had been leveled flat, though the car’s tires were still buried in snow and ice. But then I would have spent a couple of hours digging snow and would not have written parts of the previous chapter. In fact, I was so absorbed in writing that for the most part, I had no thoughts of going into town and getting supplies or driving to the dump or meeting a friend for tea.

  By not doing anything and being unaware of the current state of the predicament causing an ongoing impasse, the predicament improved, almost to the point of being resolved. But not quite. It still required my attention to fully resolve it. And it took someone else to act on it in order for it to improve.

  Let me take this metaphor and apply it to a way of working with impasses in meditation. Being absorbed in something, like the breath, and ignoring the current state of some kind of predicament one has experienced before in meditation can work on an impasse to a degree but, in my opinion, not completely. When I referred to the belief of ignoring an impasse and just trusting your method of meditation to eliminate it, I was not referring to this situation. This is different. Here, you go in and out of the impasse. When you are free of it for a while, you still know that the predicament will reappear and reassert itself at some point down the line. At that point you need to be willing to look at it. And it may truly be diminished and thus easier to tolerate.

  There is a definite interplay between impasses and calm spaces. In these instances, the impasse may manifest as a type of impediment or hindrance, such as are described in the Buddhist literature. As a hindrance, it is an obstacle to becoming calm and focused. Generally, calmness and a sense of well-being are what meditators are seeking. They are not usually seeking to know more about what gets in the way of being calm, but would rather know how to get through hindrances and arrive at calm states of mind. Primarily for that reason, such hindrances are not deemed worthy of investigation, and so meditators are often not interested in them. And yet, a hindrance such as restlessness (worries, anxieties, fears) may take up much of a sitting.

  What makes a hindrance an impasse, in my opinion, is when it recurs in an oppressive and constricting way. So that even when you pass through a period of being lustful or hateful to a period of settled mind, the lust and the hate return sometime after the calm state has passed. When you find yourself cycling back and forth between calmness and chaos, then you may notice that what you have taken as a temporary hindrance is actually “a predicament affording no obvious escape.”

  I could draw from countless reports on meditation sittings from students to support what I am saying, but to illustrate it for you, I will use the first journal I received from a student whom I have now worked with for nearly five years.

  His name is Jonathan. His meditation practice began with some classes in Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, in which he primarily learned to focus on the breath at the abdomen. He went on to attend a couple of ten-day Goenka Vipassana meditation retreats and then some retreats led by an American Vipassana teacher. On retreat he would do the meditation practice he was taught, and he saw himself as a willing and obedient student who needed some kind of formalized, structured technique in order to meditate. After the retreats, he would generally revert back to his initial meditation practice of just observing the breath, remaining, however, still very much concerned about doing it right.

  When he first contacted me, I suggested he keep a journal for a week and send it to me. Here is what he wrote.

  Day one (40 min.): Felt less agitated than in previous sits. Wondering, “What should I be doing?” . . . “What should I be noting for later recollections?” . . . Then lost in images, many of which I don’t remember. But when I became aware of the fact that I had gone off somewhere, there was a feeling of alarm, which had a punitive feel to it (like I had messed up and been caught by someone [i.e., me]). It was at that point that I would intentionally become aware of the still points of contact. Then more thoughts, “Am I doing this correctly?” Noticed that my mind was generally open to the sounds outside, feeling of being able to hold sounds and bodily sensations in awareness. Thoughts seemed like free association in image form. No clear awareness of feelings/emotions that went with it.

  As you can see from this journal entry, Jonathan needed more guidance than the initial instructions I gave him, which are the same instructions I gave in chapter 2. Even if he received instructions from me that said “Just do this and nothing else,” he would end up wondering if he was doing those instructions correctly. His meditation practice is filled with this impasse around instructions: when given little or no structure, he is concerned about what he should be doing; when given structure, he is concerned about whether he is doing the instruction correctly.

  He is also meditating with the rule not to let his mind wander. This rule operates as an impediment for him to see and know the impasse he is in. This is a bit complex to explain, but please try to follow my thinking on this. First of all, it is impossible to meditate without your mind leaving the object(s) of meditation for periods of time. Your mind will wander often in meditation, and you will have trains of thought that are unusu
al, unwanted, and unsatisfying, as well as thoughts that are familiar, acceptable, and compelling. You really don’t have much control over what you will think, but you do have more control over how you react to the thinking and what you then decide to do about it. So, in a meditation practice where thinking is disallowed, the act of stopping your thoughts is also an act of controlling your experience. The rule about not allowing thinking to progress in meditation is just a rationalization for various acts of suppressing, controlling, and denying of thoughts. By trying to control his experience, Jonathan gets caught in the bind of wondering what he should do or whether he is doing the technique correctly. The way out of the bind is to sit with less control. That alone will reduce the tension between instructions and the mind as it is.

  Day two (50 min.): Mind almost immediately goes to scenarios at work. Being in a meeting, speaking in the meeting, and in some way, impressing people. A sense of self-aggrandizing. Then, upon noticing this, an awareness of feeling very deflated, sad, small. Came back to still points of contact. Level of agitation and restlessness increased. Mind goes to scenario of TV show Six Feet Under. When I’d notice I was thinking about the show there would be fear. Came back to feelings of hands on legs and noticed high levels of agitation in the body. A feeling of wanting to jump out of my skin. Mind jumped quickly from thing to thing but calmer in a way as it was jumping. Less aware of agitation when I allowed my mind to do that. A few times my mind settled on the gentle up-and-down movement of my diaphragm but could not stay with it for long. Dropped off for some time, then an awareness of having thoughts that were scary, upsetting. Not the thoughts themselves, but the realization that I had had those thoughts. More anxiety in the body, then self-talk, “Why am I having these thoughts?” “What does this mean?” Feelings of anxiety at “not having an anchor” in the meditation. Also an awareness of music (Dylan) in the background of my mind.