Human mind is discursive, it’s going all over the place, it’s sometimes referred to as monkey mind, it just goes on and on, seemingly trying to solve what it itself creates through its habitual patterns… Meditation offers techniques through which we can rest our attention to create an object of focus in order to give the mind something to do while we become aware of what else is going on around us and within our body. If the mind is given something to do, (like focus on a candle, a mantra, the breath, a narrative, etc.) we might start to notice our very personal patterns of thought.
That is essentially, generically, very simplistically, the bare-bones definition of what we’re doing when meditating. Meditation is the non-involvement with superfluous layers of mundane thoughts stripped down to, let’s pay attention to paying attention to mental patterns.
In meditation, we somehow train ourselves to stay focused on breathing, for instance, and when our mind wanders, we are supposed to just come back to the reference point that is the breath. Please notice that I am using the term training – that means consistent engaging with this practice over a long period of time. There are meditation practices that offer the mind a reference point in the form of guided meditation (which usually involves passing clouds or birds), which is often more of a narrative – storytelling is a way to preoccupy the mind and create some focus while we’re also staying present and breathing and allowing ourselves to pay attention to paying attention. Another example would be a mantra, which we repeat in our mind with a sense of rhythm, where we’re not overly focused on saying the words, but we’re using them as a placeholder, a reference point to give ourselves something to do to preoccupy the mind so that we can simultaneously pay attention to paying attention. It’s this return from when this discursive monkey mind of ours takes us to, oh, I better check my email and oh, now I realize I didn’t answer three emails, I’d better answer those that seems to be very confusing for people. This is a crucial moment – when you recognize that you are distracted, instead of berating yourself because you think you stopped meditating, the “secret” is to realize you didn’t stop meditating, you just recognized your distractions – that is an integral part of meditation. If you return to focusing without judgment, you will continue to meditate properly. If you willingly continue to be distracted, knowing that you are distracted, now you have stopped meditating. If the thought of having to answer those emails is juicier than your intention to meditate, if you don’t pay attention to the thought that says, oh, I know I was supposed to meditate, but this other stuff is truly important and…., that’s when meditation has failed. When we wake up from completely being caught up in the story, if we have some kind of place, a technique to focus our attention back that will ground us back into paying attention to paying attention, then we can start all over, just noticing we are here, continuing to pay attention and notice our thoughts. This is what’s confusing for people about meditation, in that many people think the purpose is to stop thinking. That is impossible, that does not make sense. If I tell you in this moment, stop thinking – you cannot do it, the mind just keeps going. So our goal is not to diminish thoughts, but to keep coming back from the attractive thoughts. What I have very often seen in my interaction with clients is that, through “meditation”, people are actually trying to give themselves a kind of entertainment by going on that narrative journey instead of really cultivating awareness. They’re not really strengthening their skill to pay attention to paying attention, they’re engaging in a form of day-dreaming in service of discovering something about themselves or about their world. Our goal is not to create relaxation and feeling good either, our goal is not to pursue the narrative the mind provides, our goal is not to draw some understanding from what those thoughts are saying. From the perspective of healing that I want to propose here and that I work with myself personally and with my clients, we want to use meditation as a contemplative practice to learn how to approach our mind, to learn to know our mind, to pay attention to these thought patterns and to be able to strengthen both our ability of concentration and of awareness together. Concentration and awareness enhance our ability, our skill to notice the quality of our thoughts and help us notice when we are reactionary to a particular thought, help us notice when we have the ability to let in reality and when we shut down to reality, help us begin to notice certain thoughts, feelings and sensations that we are able to be open to, and thoughts, feelings and sensations that we shut down to and close off from. So the first stage, the first intent, is to allow ourselves to be open to simply observe our mind. We do this by doing nothing, literally sitting, breathing and doing nothing – this is another glitch when it comes to meditation – reading this: sitting, breathing and doing nothing – it’s not sexy, it’s not entertaining, it’s not flashy, it has a boring feel to it, it’s uneventful… We are going to sit here and breathe and slow down, we are not going to be distracted, we are not going to try to feel good, we’re not going to try to look for meanings for our anxiety or whatever else might come up, we’re not going to try to solve a problem and have some great aha moment and insight come in – none of those relate to meditation. Those are DOINGS, those are simply more “enlightened” types of running away from what is real. Usually, in the beginning, when we do just sit and do nothing, we notice a lot of discursive monkey mind and we might not even notice when we’re off thinking about all these things that appear to be unrelated, that appear to be a bit disconnected. However, if we practice this enough, we can begin to notice patterns, we can begin to notice the quality of our thinking – so we might notice ourselves thinking about paying a bill, about wanting to go on vacation, about needing food soon – and if we’re looking at the quality of those thoughts as they pop into our mind, we might be able to discern, wow all of those things have a quality of constriction about them, a sensation in our physical body that is uncomfortable and that we can translate as frustration – I’m frustrated in paying a bill, frustrated that I can’t go on vacation, frustrated that I’m hungry… so we can begin to notice, as we’re paying attention to paying attention, that we seem to really have a good number of thoughts that make us spend a significant amount of time engaged in frustration, in reinforcing feeling constricted and uncomfortable. That’s good information, that’s really fascinating – of all the things to think about in the world, we seem to think about things that come with a feeling of constriction/frustration. That’s helpful information because we can begin to then question and find out where and when do we have a choice, where does personal responsibility come into play as to not be and act frustrated in life. A realization might come in the form of, wow, if now, when I am in a calm, serene, relaxing set-up, I simply cannot disengage from the juiciness of this frustration, how would I be able to do it when I am being triggered, busy, engaged in something stressful, etc? We might begin to see how we are being the puppets of certain thought patterns that we simply cannot let go of and that our experience of life is one where we are simply unconscious of how we think and act. Also, we can inquire about how long has this been going on, what are the circumstances this tends to appear in?… and it might open up a realization that, for an incredible period of time, maybe our entire life, our brain has been programmed and we have mindlessly participated in having a series of ongoing thoughts that are reinforcing constriction and seeing the world from the point of view of being frustrated in any and all circumstances of our life!!! That might translate into questions like, how does my mind work? What is the quality of my mind? What is the quality of my thoughts? Let me go into mapping out a “meditation guidance”, so this is understood better. First, we want to keep it simple: we’re gonna focus on our breath, we’re going to have a good sense of head and shoulders, a sense of good posture – we’re not going to slump over like we’re ready to fall asleep; we’re also not going to be too rigid where we give ourselves a backache or too rigid where our mind cannot soften because our body is so hard, we’re going to find a way to sit down comfortably – on the floor in lotus position, sitting in a chair or on a meditation bench, we can have our hands in a soft or light touch on our legs, we can turn our palms up or down, we can turn one palm up and one palm down… some people like to touch their index finger to their thumb.. (there are certain spiritual traditions that explain what are the benefits of doing that and why you would do that and where that comes from)… and we breathe and pay attention to paying attention. We pay attention to our breath, to the rise and fall of our chest and we pay attention to how we’re sitting in the chair… and we pay attention to the room around us and we begin to create a softened gaze – we’re not trying to be overly focused on any one object in the room – slightly just soften or blur our eyes in a way that we are paying attention but not purposefully really trying to stare at any one thing and then we come back to our breathing… And as we’re doing this, we are setting the intention for our body to slow down, we’re setting the intention to pay attention to paying attention… and our mind might be going a mile a minute, hooked into some drama at work or at home, it might be preoccupied with I am hungry and I need a sandwich, or it might be hooked into sexual thoughts and all of a sudden we find ourselves distracted and pulled into sexual thinking and as we notice that, we come back to the breath and use the breath as an object to remind ourselves of the intention of sitting there and just noticing… This is where the image of clouds passing through the sky comes in handy – just imagine that the clouds are thoughts. So if I want to go on vacation to visit grandma, one cloud equals the thought of visiting grandma and it just sort of floats into the mind and passes by… so the instruction is, we don’t get rid of the clouds, we cannot stop the clouds. When a cloud comes in, we let the cloud do its own thing and exist, we let it just sort of float through the sky, which means float through our mind and we don’t get hung up on the cloud, we don’t start looking for pictures and images in the cloud, we don’t start talking to the cloud, we don’t start remembering our history with this cloud and how we could solve it and what the cloud might mean. We just let the cloud pass, we don’t fuel it, but allow ourselves to say, oh, there’s a thought and this one happens to be about a vacation and as best we can, we come back to this present moment and we can do that by saying, yes, I know visit to grandma is passing through my mind and I know that it’s very entertaining to think about my amazing trip, but I’m going to let it float out of my consciousness and I can do that by coming back to what is happening here right now… and we might be able to become aware of the traffic outside, we might be able to hear the bus go by, we might notice the brightness of the lights in the room and realize, wow it’s really bright here all of a sudden, now that I’m just paying attention to paying attention… and then we come back to the breath, not focussing on the brightness even… We let it all pass, we just let it go, we let the thought come in and let it go, we let the thought come in and we let the thought go… A challenge with all of this has to do with intention – many people come into meditation with the intention of feeling good and wanting to relax and so this becomes for them a “doing” where they are fighting the reality of where they are at. Meditation though is not an excuse to manipulate what is or isn’t happening, we cannot manipulate our feeling states, we cannot be judgmental of certain feelings that we like and certain feelings we don’t like, certain thoughts that we like and certain thoughts that we don’t like. I mean, we can, but that isn’t meditation, that is still mind-patterns. So, for example, if while I’m meditating, anxiety comes in, the goal is to treat it like a cloud and let the anxiety float through my mind and notice it, but I’m not particularly interested in getting rid of it and I’m not particularly interested in immediately countering it by manipulating myself to feel good or to feel calm or to feel relaxed – this is one reason why meditation gets convoluted and confusing, is that number of people are trying to use it in a way to manufacture the type of states of mind that they like, they’re trying to manipulate their mind into feeling good and into pushing away those feeling states or those thoughts that feel bad. Another way I oftentimes see this pseudo-meditation manifest is when people derive stories about another person as a result of their “meditative process”: I understood from my meditation that so-and-so did this because they are this way, or didn’t do this or whatever... What has happened here is that the person simply engaged into a ceremony their ego loves, to pursue the momentum of their unconscious patterns. Their experience was totally overcome by the same mental processes that created the perceived issues they are confronted with. Meditation never brings awareness about something out there, but about the quality, the flavour of our own experience. Another difficulty, when we’re meditating, is that we need to calm ourselves down enough to welcome whatever experience comes up, which might not be calm at all – so there’s a paradox here: we are attempting to be calm with those parts of ourselves that are not calm, we are attempting to stay present, available, open, centred and grounded, even if a tornado comes through and so we’re going to have to say, hi tornado, hi thought to that really difficult powerful destructive thought that just came into our mind… We are thus becoming more and more able to sit there, breathing with it, noticing how long it takes for that tornado to pass through the sky of our mind, noticing our desire to get rid of it, to run away from it, to get up and leave… In that moment we could also notice another layer of thought that says to label meditation and say meditation is not going well for us since we are having this tornado come in: I just can’t focus, I couldn’t get past the tornado and so meditation doesn’t work for me, I don’t like meditation, meditation is not helpful, I don’t even really understand it – you’re doing it fine, there’s nothing to understand, there’s nothing to get rid of – when the tornado comes in, that’s your experience – you just need to keep paying attention to how you’re engaging with that tornado and this will strengthen your ability to be present with reality. The practice of meditation, the practice of strengthening our observer self serves to pay attention to whatever is actually happening as it’s happening and just notice the tornado instead of losing our marbles and reacting and freaking out and throwing things and jumping up and down having temper tantrums, or imploding, or dissociating, or projecting, or falling asleep, or immediately needing to seek some self-medication or distraction or entertainment or getting into an argument about it! In meditation, we observe, we slow down and observe even though our mind might not be slowing down because of currently being in its tornado nature state. If we do this enough, if we notice our mind, if we notice these habitual patterns, if we strengthen the observer self which allows us to identify or stay more grounded in reality, eventually, we will start to take the skill and quality of this observing with us throughout our life, to moments where we’re not actually in the meditative disciplined practice, but standing in line at the bank or out to dinner or on a date or with a family member. And our meditation practice can start to “bleed into” noticing when these really difficult tornado thoughts are entering our mind and to observe our old habitual ways of being reactionary, but now, we are becoming more and more able to let them pass without all the drama. We are now more and more conscious and determined to take responsibility for our experience where we decide, okay, this drama is my gateway to constriction and frustration. I know where this pattern leads me into – no more! This is what is referred to as mindfulness – that translates into being less reactionary and it means that the experience of what’s going on in our thoughts does not have as much power of control over us as if we’re a puppet to those tornado thoughts or a puppet to the discursive monkey mind that used to take us all over the place and pull us into wounds, projections and imagination… We are now here, we are now present, we’re not living an imaginary life, we really are able to listen and be present and be available, not distracted in all of these crazy monkey thoughts pulling us every which way they want. The practice of meditation cultivates awareness and strengthens our observer self so that we can develop the skill to bring this level of discernment and attention to our real life and quit being immersed into imagination – that’s the value, that’s why we need do this!