The Meditator's Dilemma

  “This delightful, inspiring, and practical book can help transform anyone’s meditation practice from a struggle to a joy. Based on years of experience as a gifted psychologist and meditation teacher, Dr. Morgan lucidly shows us how to avoid the pitfalls that make meditation unnecessarily difficult, while finding ways to harness our surprisingly natural capacity for clarity and ease. Full of wisdom and compassion, it’s a must-read for all who wish to deepen and enliven their meditation practice and live a richer, happier, more connected life.”

  —Ronald D. Siegel, PsyD, author of The Mindfulness Solution

  “Have you ever wanted to know the secret of a happy meditator? With disarming candor and delightful humor, psychologist Bill Morgan shares hard-won insights gleaned from over forty years on the cushion. He shows us how to bring the qualities of play, delight, gratitude, warmth, and tenderness to mindfulness meditation practice, while remaining rooted in the ancient teachings of the Buddha. This book has the power to liberate the hearts of both novice and seasoned meditators. Spare yourself unnecessary struggle and read it now!”

  —Christopher Germer, PhD, author of The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion

  “In The Meditator’s Dilemma, Bill Morgan offers us some of the many fruits of his long meditation experience. His firsthand experience of grappling with the dilemmas that confront most meditators helps illuminate some of the common difficulties and struggles we encounter on the path. In this very helpful book, he offers a wide array of skillful suggestions that allow for a natural and more easeful unfolding of our insight and understanding.”

  —Joseph Goldstein, author of Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening

  “A noteworthy reevaluation of one Westerner’s initial enthusiasm over mindfulness meditation. William Morgan shares his frustrations and his solutions in this timely work.”

  —Mark Epstein MD, author of The Trauma of Everyday Life

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  THE

  MEDITATOR’S DILEMMA

  An Innovative Approach to Overcoming Obstacles and Revitalizing Your Practice

  BILL MORGAN

  SHAMBHALA Boulder 2016

  Shambhala Publications, Inc.

  4720 Walnut Street

  Boulder, Colorado 80301

  www.shambhala.com

  © 2016 by Bill Morgan

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Morgan, Bill (Psychologist)

  Title: The meditator’s dilemma: an innovative approach to overcoming obstacles and revitalizing your practice / Bill Morgan.

  Description: First Edition. | Boulder: Shambhala, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015029253 | eISBN 978-0-8348-4011-9 | ISBN 9781611802481 (pbk.: alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Meditation—Buddhism.

  Classification: LCC BQ5612 .M67 2016 | DDC 294.3/4435—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015029253

  For my father, who loved hard and died young

  We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure, but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world.

  —Jack Gilbert

  CONTENTS

  Appreciations

  Introduction

  PART ONE

  THE WESTERN MEDITATOR’S DILEMMA

  1. The Striving Problem

  2. Different Strokes

  3. The Inner Holding Environment

  4. Making Meditation Personal

  PART TWO

  CULTIVATING THE HOLDING ENVIRONMENT

  5. Relaxation

  6. Playfulness and Delight

  7. Gratitude and Wonder

  8. Warmth and Tenderness

  PART THREE

  TRANQUILITY PRACTICE

  9. Concentration Blues

  10. Tranquility Games

  11. Making Concentration Accessible

  12. Deepening Tranquility

  PART FOUR

  THE CULTIVATION OF INSIGHT

  13. The Seven Factors of Optimal Presence

  14. Investigation Games

  15. Rising and Falling Games

  16. “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” Games

  17. The Malleable Self

  18. Interpersonal Games

  Afterword: Kiss the Joy as It Flies

  Notes

  Bibliography

  E-mail Sign-Up

  APPRECIATIONS

  MUCH GRATITUDE TO:

  Joseph Goldstein, who, since 1978, has supported and inspired me through six years of silent retreats at the Insight Meditation Society and Forest Refuge.

  Numerous pioneer teachers who have dedicated their lives to bringing these practices to the West, and who kindled me in the process.

  Fellow members of the Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy, especially Chris Germer, Ron Siegel, Paul Fulton, Jan Surrey, Charles Styron, Trudy Goodman, Susan Pollak, Tom Pedulla, Sara Lazar, Chris Willard, and Nayla Khoury for their enduring support over the past thirty years.

  Bill O’Hanlon, who always believed there was a book forthcoming.

  Cindy Barrilleaux, who was there from the beginning; she was persevering in keeping the work grounded and lifting me during darker moments.

  Gordon Thomas, who, in the latter stages of the project, helped greatly with consolidation and flow.

  Jeanne Ann Whittington, a dear friend who reviewed several iterations of the book with great care and insight.

  All of the clients and fellow meditators who inspired me more than they can know.

  My dear sister Melanie: steady, loving, and true.

  My radiant partner and coteacher, Susan, who pours love into everything she touches and inspires me endlessly.

  INTRODUCTION

  IT IS DARK AND COLD in the mountains as I shuffle to the meditation hall in my dark robe at three thirty in the morning. I’m still half asleep, but my first thought before settling into meditation is, Maybe this will be the day I have an important breakthrough.

  The atmosphere in the hall is tense, and the teacher’s assistant has already begun her ominous, slow pacing in front of the row of meditators. She is carrying a stick the length of a yardstick but wider and thicker. Definitely thicker. This woman is prepared to strike anyone who appears sleepy or uninspired. Of course, there is a certain arbitrariness to her assessment, so one can never relax.

  I am twenty years old and have just come across the country during my summer break, highly motivated to find something deep and true, a life-changing insight that would surely reorient my life after the sudden death of my dear father. Numb, shocked, and disenchanted with once-satisfying activities, I am struggling to recapture a sense of purpose. I had read accounts of great breakthroughs in meditation following deep personal loss. If I stay unrelentingly with my meditation practice, perhaps my life will undergo a radical transformation.

  The tap on my shoulder comes as a surprise, as does my momentary unwillingness to bow to the woman standing before me. I remind myself that she is only doing this for the benefit of my practice. She wants only to raise my energy and dedication to a higher level. Remembering that life is short, I bow. She reaches to find the soft tissue above my shoulder blade, of which, being thin, I have precious little. Who can blame her if, in the dark, she misses and
strikes bone, the stick breaking in half with the force of the strike, one piece crashing into the altar twenty feet away and knocking over a small Buddha statue. She strides to the back of the altar to retrieve another stick and returns to strike my other shoulder harder than the first. There is no time for tears like these, I think. But they do not stop flowing.

  The year was 1972. Buddhist psychology and mindfulness were landing in earnest on Western shores, and I attempted to find solace and freedom through meditation. I rode this wave with dedication in those early days, exploring a variety of traditions. Over the next ten years, I would spend six months in a Trappist monastery, a summer at a Zen center, nine months at a Tibetan meditation center, and two three-month periods in retreats at the Insight Meditation Society in Massachusetts.

  My choice of intensive environments in which to practice was reinforced by the teaching methods of the times, which actively encouraged a version of the hero’s journey. Fiery determination and fierce effort were expected in those days. I was on board with that and believed that my inability to have a transformative breakthrough was due to my lack of diligence. The solution was to work still harder.

  I did just that when, in 1984, I was invited to a three-month, very intensive meditation retreat with a teacher named Sayadaw U Pandita from Burma. It comprised daily interviews and incessant reminders to meditators of our laziness and the necessity of making sustained effort in order to attain enlightenment. Knowing that I was going to enter graduate school after the retreat fueled my determination. I worked feverishly, beating my head against an imagined wall in the hope of becoming enlightened. On one occasion, I thought I had broken through the wall, only to find that the neighboring cell was equally dry and humorless.

  For many years I had been hesitant to write about this sobering aspect of meditation practice. Who wants to hear about the resistances and struggles involved, about misconceptions, missteps, and unmet expectations? Who wants to read a “self-hell” book?

  Several events contributed to my change of heart. My graduate research, completed in 1990, focused on progress in meditation. As part of this project, I interviewed many practitioners, and this yielded a consistent and surprising result. Every meditator I interviewed struggled extensively with a sense of striving, failure, and disappointment in meditation. Each one had difficulty establishing a regular practice. I discovered I was not alone.

  Since then, over the years of teaching meditation and working with clients in my psychotherapy practice, I have come to see that my struggles, striving, and self-defeating styles of practice are common among Western students. Many others deal with a sense of frustration and ineffectiveness in their meditation or have been unable to apply the practice in daily life situations. In fact, I suspect that a silent majority of meditators struggle and feel alone in their struggle. Perhaps they fail to report the extent of their sense of inadequacy to their teachers or fellow practitioners out of a desire to be seen as motivated or accomplished.

  My suspicions were confirmed when, several years ago, I wrote an article titled “Resistance in Meditation.” In it I characterize the practice of meditation as a series of narcissistic injuries and disappointments. Afterward, I heard from many practitioners who resonated with this sense of struggle and who encouraged me to explore this topic further.

  Despite my well-grounded sense that most meditators struggle, I could not have written this book had I not experienced a series of insights in my practice. The most pivotal revealed that the way I had been practicing was largely ineffective because it was pressured, forced, and filled with self-judgment. This led me to radically reevaluate, dismantle, and reorganize every aspect of my practice.

  Motivated to reinvent meditation as a deeply personal, intimate practice, I began to consider other, possibly more creative ways for holding my attention. Having given myself permission to experiment with approaches outside the box, I discovered new methods of reflection and practice that were actually enlivening. At this juncture, meditation began to unfold in new and transformative ways.

  Having made these discoveries, I thought they could benefit others. Along with my partner, Susan, a long-term meditator and psychotherapist, I have since been teaching these new approaches in retreats and with individual clients with striking results. It is one thing to experience a personal epiphany, and quite another to have it verified by the subjective reports of others. It is this wider validation that has encouraged me to further share these revitalizing approaches to meditation. Without the positive feedback of students and clients, this boat would not have left the dock.

  This book is written for new meditators as well as the many experienced practitioners who have experienced similar struggles. Chapter 1 deals with what I consider to be the elephant in the meditation room: common pitfalls in meditation, misguided assumptions and unbalanced styles of practice, dysfunctional and destructive attitudes in meditation that can persist for many years, and the hard-to-notice toxic filters through which we practice. While some degree of sweat and tears must be endured in any growth process, suffering in meditation is often unnecessary. I know this territory intimately.

  Chapter 2 addresses the cultural dispositions that make it difficult for Westerners to practice meditation. Traditional meditation instructions arose at a particular time and in a specific context very different from that in which most of us practice today.

  Chapter 3 introduces a context for framing meditation practice suitable to our cultural setting. Relatively little attention has been given to setting the stage for meditation. Perhaps this is not necessary for practitioners raised in a culture where traditional practices and faith in them have been present for millennia. However, in our culture, this is the most overlooked and under-appreciated aspect of meditation teaching. I call this the “inner holding environment.”

  Chapter 4 considers the importance of personal meaning making in meditation. Traditional instructions tend to minimize the personal in favor of universal truths. Because we live in a culture that emphasizes self-development and enhancement, this cultural predisposition needs to be incorporated into meditation instruction. Westerners need a unique and personal gateway into these practices.

  The next section of the book focuses on skills that facilitate meditation. I liken this to a sports experience I had as a child. When I was eleven years old, I switched from baseball to golf as my primary sport. I knew how to hold and swing a bat, so I assumed that a golf club wouldn’t give me difficulty. Thus I never felt the need to take a lesson. After struggling with slices and hooks for several years, I took a single lesson that improved my golf game dramatically. It turned out that I had been holding the club incorrectly, which had negatively affected the distance and trajectory of the ball.

  It is the same in meditation. We need new skills. Consciously exploring the inner landscape in meditation requires unique sensitivities. Just as in my experience with golf, if you do not learn how to “hold” your meditation practice, the distance and trajectory of your meditation will be disappointing. We need a new framework for our practice that invites increasing intimacy with the inner landscape of our experience. This section explores how to create this supportive container. The lack of this holding container is largely responsible for why many Westerners get lost in their efforts to meditate.

  Chapters 5 through 8 are devoted to each aspect of creating this inner holding environment: settling the body, establishing the mood, arousing affect in a number of ways, finding personally meaningful ways to engage with the practice. Each of these contributes to the foundation for meditation.

  Having developed a lush and meaningful holding environment, the second half of the book invites those who want to, to advance their meditation into the adventurous worlds of concentration, open-awareness, and inquiry practices. Here light is shed on common pitfalls of these realms. Concentration can be daunting and exasperating for Westerners. Because interest—not striving—is the mother of concentration, this section introduces playful an
d creative ways of bypassing striving. Meditation “games,” offered in these chapters, also enhance engagement in the inquiry process.

  Having direct experience with enlivening meditation practice is pivotal. Thinking about how it feels to gaze at the waters of the ocean on a favorite beach is not the same as physically being there. Reflecting on the benefits of meditation does not substitute for its actual taste. With this in mind, guided meditation exercises are offered throughout this book. Audio versions of many of these practices are available at http://www.shambhala.com/the-meditator-s-dilemma.html and at www.billandsusan.net/meditatorsdilemma.

  Rethinking meditation alone will not lead to an enriched and sustainable relationship with practice. Only by trying a new approach a few times and evaluating its effectiveness versus a previous method of practice can we make the necessary assessments and adjustments. The Buddha urged others to consider his words carefully, to contemplate, to meditate, to draw their own conclusions based on personal investigation. This spirit is captured in the Pali word ehipassiko, which means “come and see for yourself.” It is in that spirit that I invite you to try these exercises. While they have been designed to revitalize your meditation practice, you must evaluate them for yourself.

  It took a long time for meditation practice to bear fruit in my life. I’d like you to suffer less than I did and to find joy in meditation sooner. It is my sincere wish that this book will put the wind in your sails, so that your mindfulness practice becomes more meaningful and satisfying at every stage in the journey.

  PART ONE

  THE WESTERN MEDITATOR’S DILEMMA

  There are two kinds of light—the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures.

  —James Thurber

  1

  THE STRIVING PROBLEM