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

by Jason Siff

  There are many elements of your sittings that won’t make it into words, pictures, or impressions, but these may be remembered still. It is nearly impossible to represent them to yourself completely, much less convey them to another. But they are still part of your description.

  The description and the experience it describes are joined together, just like when you use the name for an experience to describe it when you talk about it. When you describe, for example, “a confusion over what I should be doing in meditation,” that description can be applied to other similar experiences and may even be used when you’re having such an experience as the way of noticing it. Or you might note such experiences with the shorthand, single-word description “confusion.”

  A transformative conceptualization process has developed here. The name for an experience now comes from a description of it, and both name and description are used when talking about it. The conceptualizing may then go further, where new, more honest descriptions form out of being with such experiences, and consequently, the name used to designate the experience may come into question and be found lacking, whereby a new name (or description) will be sought. As the process continues, naming may become very difficult, and describing may become the only viable way of conceptualizing your experiences.

  Seeing into the Narrative of an Experience

  Seeing into the narrative of an impasse usually takes a certain amount of experiential familiarity with it over time, as well as a lightening of the impasse through the initial two steps of the transformative conceptualization process. It can still be done when the impasse is somewhat heavy, but not when it is impassable, for in such a case you would most likely encounter frustration. There needs to be some period of time in which you are not completely embedded in the impasse in order for you to see into it in the ways I am about to describe.

  In addition to impasses around concepts like doubt, we also have our own personal narratives about having faith in something or someone, or the opposite—distrusting people, authorities, religions, and so forth. Our own history with the religion we were brought up in might arise. We may remember how we were treated in it, what we learned in it, and the views and morality it gave us that still influence us. Or if not a religion, then maybe a memory—of a club, a team, an organization, an institution, or any situation where one had to “believe” in a program or a person—may appear as supporting or feeding this experience of doubt. It may be that rebelling against authority figures is something you do quite reflexively, while other people quite naturally trust someone who is an authority. Or you might find your personal narratives to be somewhere between these extremes: you’re cautious about what you believe in, needing to ask questions and test things out over time, or you’re only willing to trust someone after having observed his or her motives and character on a number of occasions.

  Our narratives around teachings play a large part in keeping the impasse of doubt alive, and they may be harder to detect and investigate than the personal narratives we are more familiar with. We may be living with a rather simple narrative that we should believe everything about the teachings we are practicing and not question them, since they come from someone wiser and more spiritually developed than we are. But that view leads to dependence on the teacher, or his or her tradition, and does not usually allow us to have critical thoughts about the practices we’re doing and the teachings we’re receiving. The belief that we should not doubt our teacher (which is strong in many Buddhist traditions) turns the experience of doubt into an area of conflict, bringing up the fear of being rejected by the teacher and having to find another. If only more teachers of meditation could accept the role doubt, confusion, and critical thinking play in a meditator’s development of independence and autonomy, they could perhaps support it as something healthy for the individual instead of seeing it as a rejection of their teachings or betrayal of their trust.

  Conflict with the narratives often arises within this process, and this process of conflict is essential for anyone who wants to fully examine the concepts he or she has taken on in meditation practice. When we start to withdraw our belief in the various narratives that are sustaining impasses, it is not just a simple rejection of those narratives; rather, it is facing the import and significance that those narratives have had for our practice. You can still respect and value the teachers and the teachings they’ve imparted to you while at the same time believing in them less and less and seeing into them more and more. Perhaps the main reason many people resist the path of unlearning meditation has to do with not knowing how to question a teaching, or a teacher’s method, without rejecting it. It’s likely that some elements of your meditation practice will be dropped in the process, as will certain concepts, but the invaluable and irreplaceable elements will still remain a part of your continuing practice.

  In this process of transformative conceptualization, new narratives will be generated in your meditation practice, ones based on the new descriptions and the new ways of seeing things. These new narratives may help you through impasses. Such narratives, and there can be many that will come to you, function for the time when they are fresh and vital, but often lose their ability to affect experience as they become stale and turn into concepts divorced from the experiences they arose alongside.

  An Initial Transformative Conceptualization

  Toward the end of my time as a Buddhist monk in Sri Lanka, I went through this transformative conceptualizing process after unlearning meditation. After I had unlearned much of the practice taught by Mahasi Sayadaw of noting each moment of my experience, I began to study particular discourses of the Buddha’s that listed the various elements of our mental world. I combined this study with further reading in the Abhidhamma, notably the book mentioned in an earlier chapter, A Comprehensive Manual of Abhidhamma. The model I was then using to understand my meditative experience was one heavily based on naming each experience and having that name relate to something that truly exists as found in these texts.

  With the belief that craving exists with a pleasant sensation, I would notice pleasant sensations and see the craving that arose with them. With the belief that anger arose with unpleasant sensations, I would notice unpleasant sensations with that association in mind. By doing so, I believed I was seeing the truth of craving and anger (or aversion), and by naming my experiences as such, I was getting at the core reality of those experiences. Along with naming these experiences, I was seeing them as arising and passing away, even when they seemed to last for some time, as I had developed the habit of breaking down all of my experiences into successive moments of discrete, separate events. I became an avid observer who tried to notice every moment as it arose and passed away, making each fit a name that was connected with a system of names found either in the Buddha’s discourses or in the later Abhidhamma.

  I found myself engaged in this practice of naming my experiences mostly when I was doing walking meditation or at other times outside of a meditation sitting. When I sat, I would mostly name experiences that were either defilements or hindrances, and sometimes I would name subtler or more wholesome states of mind, though I mostly left those unnamed. I was more interested in the subtle wholesome states of mind and so tended to reflect on them more, explore them in greater depth, and come up with descriptions for them. The unwholesome states of mind were less interesting, and in accordance with the meditation culture in which I found myself, my aim was to overcome, diminish, or transcend them. Naming them as they arose was the accepted way of working with them.

  After some months of meditating like this, it occurred to me to make a distinction between hindrances and unwholesome mental states. The sense-desire found in a hindrance was essentially the same as the “mind state with craving accompanied by a pleasant sensation” except for one significant difference: The hindrance of desire persisted for a longer period of time and made it difficult to get settled and focused. The mind state of desire could be far shorter, even lasting only a few seconds, and did
not hinder my mind from getting settled and focused. I was not as engrossed or embedded in transitory mind states, as they could even occur while I was calm and concentrated but not affect the peace and calm I was experiencing. While, on the other hand, a hindrance would have me in its grip for a while, and I would have to go through it before my mind would settle.

  When I applied this conceptualization to another experience that arose in meditation, anger, I soon discovered that there was a great deal more going on during the longer periods of anger than could be covered by the word anger. I had believed, as I had been taught, that the experience of many hours of being upset about something in my meditation sittings was just made up of the arising and passing away of moments of anger that were wrongly apprehended as a self that was angry, and that if I could see anger as just the arising and passing away of these mind-moments, I would become free of it. From going through a few periods of meditating with angry feelings that lasted for several hours and noticing what it was I was indeed experiencing (instead of what I should be naming as the experience), I quickly saw that there were moments of fear, hurt, rage, loneliness, sadness, remorse, guilt, resentment, and so forth appearing throughout these long episodes. I began to see that there really was no hindrance of “pure” ill will—such a hindrance had to be composed of other feelings that interacted with each other and kept the whole thing going.

  Still, I believed in many of the other narratives of Theravada Buddhism and found myself questioning one adopted belief after another for many months. I progressively loosened up my meditation practice to allow myself to think deeply about these beliefs and whether they were verifiable within my experience. No aspect of the Buddhist doctrine was immune from this type of examination. I questioned the validity of the Four Noble Truths, the three characteristics of existence (impermanence, suffering, and no-self), and whether liberation of mind is possible. I came to believe that as concepts, none of the teachings are true—they are just narratives to help people live more wholesome and happier lives. This is the direct opposite of what I started out believing.

  One day I read this famous passage in the Lankavatara Sutra, a Mahayana text: “From the day of the Buddha’s awakening to his final entering into nibbana, he did not proclaim a doctrine.” This reverberated within my consciousness for days. It made sense to me. The Buddha did not teach a doctrine. He taught what he had experienced as a way for his mind to find peace and not get caught up in producing more pain for himself and others. His way was founded not on a system of right-sounding beliefs but on experiential knowledge. The truth of one’s experience is the truth of the teaching. And the concepts about one’s experiences are just the imperfect ways we have for thinking and talking about them. When I saw this, the Buddha’s teaching began to make sense to me once again, for from having examined it to the point of abandoning it, I came to understand it anew from a completely different angle, from having unlearned the meditation practices and the concepts embedded in them that I had been taught.

  It is from going through this process of transformative conceptualization, on multiple occasions with different impasses, that I have been able to develop this approach to unlearning meditation. It is not a procedure or strategy that you can employ—it is a skill (or process) you can learn and refine.

  13

  Effortless Calm

  The process of getting into a calm state is fairly straightforward. It happens in meditation practice through watching the breath, using a mantra, or following a guided meditation. If you do any of these practices, your mind will eventually calm down and the disturbing, distracting thoughts will go away. What is there to unlearn here?

  I didn’t consider that there was anything to unlearn about calm states until I began questioning the whole notion of applying effort to become calm. When I was most agitated, anxious, or restless and I needed my mind to settle down, the effort to bring my attention to my breath would tend to have a frantic, pressured, and even desperate quality. It then came to me that the mind that was agitated was the same mind that was applying effort, so no wonder my attempts to hold awareness of the breath were forced and aggressive. That is how I act when agitated. I get impatient, and when I do something, I do it aggressively, not slowly or calmly as I would when more settled.

  It’s paradoxical to act slowly, calmly, and kindly when you’re feeling restless, anxious, and impatient. For most people beginning meditation, a guided meditation that plants the ideas of “letting go of thoughts,” “sinking into the body,” “moving with the flow of the breath,” relayed in a gentle, soothing voice seems to be the most direct way of cutting through the tension at the outset of a meditation sitting. Getting calm on your own by a bare, silent noticing of the breath may not be as easy as being led to the breath by a relaxed and reliable guide, though you may at times be your own guide, speaking to yourself in a way that helps you relax into the breath. Following the breath can in itself be quite relaxing, even hypnotic.

  Many of the meditation practices people do for the purpose of calming the mind bear such a close resemblance to hypnosis that I wonder what the actual differences are. Certainly, a guided meditation meant to induce a trance state is not all that different from a verbal hypnotic induction, except for the fact that it lacks posthypnotic suggestions, but what about being aware of the breath at the nostrils or abdomen? Is that a hypnotic way of inducing a calm state?

  The answer depends on the technique you use, how you use it, and what you experience.

  Counting breaths, or noting them using labels like “breathing in” and “breathing out,” is akin to hypnosis. You are adding words to the experience of breathing, often turning the breathing into something regular and rhythmic. You are also following the words just as much as you’re following the breath, which fills and draws your attention more than just staying with the breath without using words or numbers. If you do this enough, you find your mind gets habituated to this procedure of calming. And generally, the calm state you experience is much the same each time. This way of inducing a calm state is fairly predictable and reliable, that is, unless you find yourself in a psychological space or physical environment where you just can’t concentrate on breath and the words you use to note it. Then it not only may not work, but it may become a frustrating exercise, fraught with tension and ending in disappointment.

  Rather than using words to stay focused on the breath, you may be taught to focus on the sensation of breathing as either the touch of air at the nostrils or the rise and fall of the abdomen or diaphragm. At first this may be accompanied by words, such as in and out or rising and falling, but you are attempting to be aware of the physical sensation of breathing, and so the words fade away and you just notice how the abdomen feels when it inflates and deflates, or how the breath brushes against your upper lip like a feather or enters your nose like a gentle breeze blowing through an open window. As you stay with the “natural breath” (as S. N. Goenka refers to it), you may find that it is uneven, and far from its being hypnotic, it can be both compelling and disturbing. Your attention is following something a bit more wild than the controlled and relaxing breathing that is tamed by words and concentration, which often requires even greater effort to stay with, especially since there are no words being planted in your experience, and you must sit with your thoughts intruding, distracting, judging. This is certainly not hypnosis.

  Being with the natural breath in meditation may lead to calm states, but that is not its sole purpose—it can also lead to other kinds of meditative experiences. Breath meditation of this sort is thus taught as not just for the quieting of the mind but also for becoming aware of whatever you experience. When you begin a meditation sitting with this kind of awareness of the breath established, you may not know which way it will go: calm or otherwise. With the hypnotic forms of breath meditation, you pretty well know the direction in which your meditation sittings should go, for you are manipulating and influencing the meditation in that direction.

  Now,
there is a third way that your mind can get calm in meditation. You have already encountered it in the previous chapters and perhaps in your meditation sittings. It is effortless and just happens. There is no technique behind it. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing for us to do. A good deal of unlearning is needed in order for us to truly trust and accept this other way of entering calm states in meditation.

  Drifting Off and Waking Up

  About fifteen years ago, I wrote an article with the title “Drifting Off and Waking Up” and published it in a small newsletter I was sending out at the time. In that article I tried to describe the benefits of letting ourselves drift off toward sleep in our meditation sittings. I will be doing the same, and a much better job of it, in the next few chapters. The basic idea is that when we truly allow ourselves to drift off in meditation, instead of falling asleep, we may find that we just graze the surface of sleep and emerge into a wakeful, tranquil state. If you allow yourself to be drowsy, rather than struggling against it, you may find yourself coming out the other end in a calm state of mind that has all the qualities of tranquil meditative states, because it is one. Here is an example from someone’s journal.

  I became aware gradually that I was getting sleepy, although sleepy isn’t the best word—maybe more relaxed. I thought “Thank goodness” because this usually means that soon I’ll be less attached to the thoughts—they seem to happen without me thinking them. Which is what happened. I went into a dreamlike state. I was awake throughout as far as I know, although I can’t remember too much, except that there was a dog talking to his vet about his treatment during one part. Another thing I remember, probably because it is so unusual, is very vivid images of moving quickly through a forest—probably because of a movie I’d watched the night before.