The Meditator's Dilemma Read online

MOST OF US KNOW THE FEELING of being deeply alive and in the moment, captured by a meaningful activity or poignant interaction. Even if it comes rarely, the experience is so palpable that when you remember it, you can almost feel it all over again. Perhaps it comes when you are outdoors in an evening, completely entranced by a beautiful sunset; or when you experience a sweet connection with a dear friend; or perhaps you’ve experienced that vibrant sense when you are caught up in gardening or spending time with a child. When was the last time you entered into a creative act in which you were fully absorbed, when time seemed to be suspended? Surely two hallmarks of this elusive state we call happiness are these viscerally experienced moments of joy and contentment.

  What if it were possible to experience these feelings more frequently and at will, even when clouds block the sunset, mosquitoes buzz you in the garden, and your friend cancels on you? In fact, through mindfulness meditation, you can do just that by going beneath the distractions and turbulence in your mind to a deeper, more engaging, and peaceful experience. In time, one can access this state with relative ease, attaining it comfortably within minutes.

  The possibility of evoking these feelings through mindfulness practice often surprises people. Considering how long I struggled in meditation, it was a wonderful revelation to me as well. The primary emphasis in most instruction is upon repeatedly returning the attention to the present moment of experience, with the implicit sense that positive states and insights will arise from that core discipline. Do that, the teaching argues, and good things are sure to follow.

  It took me twenty-five years to admit to myself that, in actuality, good things rarely followed. At that point, out of frustration, I reconsidered this core instruction and the manner in which I was practicing and took an honest inventory of the effects the practice had yielded in my life. For the longest time, I had simply taken on faith that returning to the present moment of experience, and keeping the attention there, would yield documented results, not the least of which was unalloyed peace of mind. If this wasn’t unfolding for me, I just needed to practice harder. I practiced with diligence despite the fact that the process was seldom heartfelt, resulting in a dry, cognitive experience of meditation practice. I frequently felt parched and barren, but I kept telling myself that if the drilling continued, I was sure to hit water.

  This unrewarding persistence is frequently practiced by clients in psychotherapy as well. Even when there is no progress, when the client doesn’t feel particularly understood, or when the connection with the therapist is not strong, the client imagines it is his or her fault and keeps grinding away in this ineffective scenario. I kept grinding away in an unsatisfying mindfulness practice, imagining either that I wasn’t doing it right or that I had a huge storehouse of negativity that had to be cooked out through this unhappy meditation. Surely the light bulb would go on eventually if I kept this up. But the aha moments were few and fleeting. I did learn to be more aware and mindful, but I didn’t feel better about myself or my quality of life. I wasn’t happier. This practice of mindfulness was supposed to lead at least to more ease and well-being, but that wasn’t happening for me. What was missing?

  When the Buddha taught meditation, he spoke of the necessity of first building a raft that could take us across the seas of confusion and grasping and distraction to a clearer, less troubled shore. A vital component of that raft, he taught, was concentration. And an essential piece of the concentration was calm. Concentration was about creating a pleasant, contented port in the storm, a refuge beneath the turbulent currents at the surface of the water, down to a peaceful place, so tantalizingly near at hand yet largely inaccessible without training. Without calmness, the uncollected mind would be distracted and swept away by thoughts and feelings. A relaxed focus was necessary, so the mind could stay with its varied and subtle movements without getting lost. This is why concentration practices were used first and extensively in most Buddhist meditation traditions.

  However, fifty years ago, when mindfulness practices came to our shores in earnest, we had access to the story of the Buddha’s journey. An important breakthrough in his journey was the discovery that freedom could not be attained through focus on a single object. Concentration was necessary but not sufficient for liberation, which could be accomplished through open awareness mindfulness practices only. In this manner of meditating, the attention is allowed to move about from one object to another, presumably without being distracted. Concentration was viewed by the Buddha as an essential component of meditation, but also as only preliminary.

  Therefore, the attitude of my dharma friends back in the seventies and eighties was, “Why waste time on a beginning practice?” We believed that the open-awareness practices being taught to us would lead to liberating insight into the true nature of the mind, which would in turn set us free. Wanting to go straight to the heart of the matter, we worked hard at open awareness practices and gave little attention to concentration.

  In addition, concentration practices, in their stripped-down traditional forms, are not interesting enough for the Western meditation student in our high-stimulus culture. We are more drawn to the open-awareness practices because they invite variety and complexity. Following the flow of the sensations of the breath, called for in concentration practices, is frequently perceived as monotonous. At the beginning of a recent retreat, I asked who among the paricipants found the breath to be an engaging object of meditation, and only one person raised a hand. I asked her to say more about this, and she said, “I visualize the breath to be a Ferris wheel. On the inhalation the Ferris wheel goes up, and on the exhalation it comes back down. That makes it more interesting.” I asked, “And if you don’t do that, and just stay with the sensations of the breath?” “Deadly,” she replied.

  Concentration practices, therefore, have not been emphasized much in the West. Because concentration is quite weak culturally—we are a low-attention-span, hyperactive society—this is turning out to be an oversight. If you ask long-term meditation students what the weakest link in their mindfulness practice is, most will tell you it is the ability to stay with their unfolding experience in a calm and continuous way. That is the province of concentration, which is the backbone of mindfulness.

  It took me a long time to acknowledge the lack of calm and stability in my meditation practice. Whatever insights arose were therefore sporadic and fleeting, overwhelmed by distraction and discouragement and doubt.

  I decided that the obvious step was to practice concentration meditation, which involved following the flow of sensations of the breath exclusively. That is when I discovered how weak my concentration was. When you are moving attention from one object to another, which is the technique used in open-awareness practice, it can seem that the mind is more or less staying in the present moment. Concentration on a single object, however, reveals the holes in this “more or less” perspective very quickly. When there is only one object to attend to, the wandering mind is starkly revealed.

  I worked hard at improving concentration and became increasingly frustrated, never quite capturing that promised experience of peace. Meditation felt tight, claustrophobic. At times I felt as if I were locked in a dark closet. I believed that if I had kept as many thoughts out of the mind as possible, I would eventually break out into a spacious, airy landscape. That never happened. The effort to concentrate created tension, and when I grew tired and relaxed my efforts, I was bombarded by an avalanche of thoughts that had been suppressed. Further, I was bored by the technique. So I was at an impasse again. Why was I unable to access the fruits of concentration practice—states of joy and calm—even after years of practice?

  Many meditators share the same struggles, but I have not yet seen a support group for the mindfulness-challenged. Research on the meditation dropout rate is scant, but what evidence we have reveals that more than half of those who begin meditation stop at some point, and most longer-term meditators I meet admit to being intermittent in their practice. The majority of clients
and students I have worked with have struggled to find satisfaction in their meditation. Many, like me, kept at it even when it was yielding little fruit. It is safe to say that the silent majority of meditators do not find much pleasure in their practice.

  Why so little satisfaction? If it’s true that for millennia in the East meditation has reportedly reduced suffering, is it possible that Westerners simply need a different approach that speaks to our conditioning and inclinations? I believe that is the case.

  My exasperation led me to cast a wider net in the search for solution to my meditation difficulties. Once I got beyond my self-recrimination and imagined deficits, I pondered the following questions:

  • What might be different about the Western disposition?

  • What might serve as a segue to more meaningful and satisfying mindfulness practice for myself and others in our culture?

  • Once articulated and identified, how could these insights be shared with others?

  QUESTIONS FOR CONSIDERATION

  Don’t we have to work hard at anything before experiencing benefits? Why should meditation be any different in this regard?

  While it is true that we need to consistently practice a sport or an instrument, for example, in order to make progress, the question is, how much effort is actually helpful? Too much pressure to excel, either internally or from coaches or teachers, setting the bar overly high, excessive delayed gratification, goal orientation that fails to appreciate and enjoy present-moment experience—these can quickly spoil one’s relationship with almost any activity. This is what I experienced in my early years of meditation.

  Is it possible that your style was overly pushy and ultimately contributed to your degree of struggle with meditation?

  While this is certainly true, my work with clients and students over the years, coupled with my extensive interviews with meditators during my doctoral research, suggests that excessive striving is a cultural proclivity with respect to meditation. Heroic effort was encouraged in both subtle and overt ways in the Zen, Theravadan, and Tibetan centers in which I practiced.

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  DIFFERENT STROKES

  THOUGH MANY of the pragmatic teachings of the Buddha are universal and timeless, the meditation instructions themselves were offered at a particular time and in a unique cultural context. As I continued to search for a solution to my own meditation struggles, I began to wonder about how the differences in Eastern and Western milieus might account for the magnitude of the difficulties I was encountering. I identified several discrepancies between these cultural orientations that yielded insights into my personal dilemmas.

  The Locus of Happiness: Internal versus External

  Carbon dating has determined that some of the rock carvings of humans sitting in full lotus position discovered in India and Tibet are more than five thousand years old. Even before the time of the Buddha, the path toward happiness was understood to be an inner journey. The Upanishads and Vedas taught that contemplative practice promised deeper, more meaningful states of mind. The spiritual heroes of the age were mystics and ascetic wanderers. A folk saying still common in Tibet states that “seeking happiness outside is like waiting for sunshine in a cave facing north.”

  In the pursuit of freedom for India, Mahatma Gandhi said:

  The outward freedom that we shall attain will only be in exact proportion to the inward freedom to which we may have grown in a given moment. And if this is a correct view of freedom, our chief energy must be concentrated on achieving reform from within.1

  Western culture is clearly not contemplative in this sense. The Declaration of Independence asserts that we are entitled to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” However, such pursuit is usually focused outward, toward personal goals, meaningful contributions to society, and enduring relationships, rather than to inner peace and happiness.

  Faith in Contemplation versus Faith in Action

  In a culture where looking inward is the norm, faith in contemplative practices is actively permeating the collective psyche. A few months ago, I was seated next to a Thai woman on a flight from Boston to Phoenix. We chatted, and she told me that she had grown up in a small village in Thailand. I asked what it was like being raised in her culture and whether she meditated. She said she did not meditate regularly but that meditation and a contemplative attitude were ubiquitous where she’d grown up. Like everyone, she had learned that happiness is not dependent on external conditions or possessions. As an illustration of her assertion, she related the story of a man in her home village who sold small cakes on a particular street corner. Content in his position, he represented the fourth generation in his family who had maintained the same business on the same corner for over a century. One could find his meager existence a sad lot in life, she continued, or instead, one of profound acceptance and peace.

  My fellow passenger went on to explain that when she was a child, monks came to her village seeking alms every morning. She said, “The moment I put food in a monk’s bowl with my tiny hand, the gesture felt so pure and powerful.” Her own father became a monk for six months, as was the custom in her village, which was also a rich teaching for her. She smiled radiantly as she concluded, “Because of these things, meditation is always with me. It is in my bones. Even when I close my eyes for a moment and notice the breath, the mind gets still, and I am immediately filled with faith and joy.”

  This attitude toward contemplation represents a profound cultural difference that has not been fully appreciated in the West. Yet the difference is understandable. Buddhist psychology and practice have been in Western culture not for twenty-six hundred years but for less than one hundred. Perhaps if I had been raised with a culturally engrained confidence in mindfulness practices and their fruits, simple meditation instructions would have sufficed, and I would not be constantly assaulted by boredom and frustration when meditating.

  In contrast, our Western paradigm seeks happiness through personal agency, independence, self-efficacy, self-enhancement, will-power, achievement, and measurable success. There are countless self-help books that encourage accepting oneself unconditionally, but such views are not supported by cultural norms. These “don’t worry, be happy” messages may seem quaint and comforting in the short run, but putting them into practice is another matter.

  As a therapist, I often hear a poignant and deeply engrained narrative from my clients who insist, “I can create the life I want and achieve happiness only after I have overcome obstacles to success, such as procrastination, fear, doubt, and unworthiness.” I try to help them recognize and soften the relentless pressure residing in such beliefs, but in Western culture, this is a steep path.

  Faith in Mindfulness versus Faith in Thinking

  In the West we are conditioned to think rationally. My father used to tease, “Use your head for something besides a hat rack.” Organized, logical, analytic thinking and the ability to sort, synthesize, induce, and deduce form the foundation of Western scholarship and education. Intuition is valued, but primarily in people who have already mastered those more cognitive skills. Einstein’s renowned intuition comes to mind. For the rest of us, intuition is viewed as a first cousin to daydreaming, and we had best get on with the prevailing program of clear and productive thought. Descartes’s dictum—“I think, therefore I am”—continues to undergird this paradigm.

  Even within this focus on rationality, our culture has contradictory attitudes about cognition. On the one hand, we are attached to and proud of clear, rational thought. On the other, we often get caught up in obsessive, usually negative, thinking. Such largely irrational rumination can be exhausting and demoralizing. Certainly it does not lead to inner peace.

  The Eastern paradigm of cognition does not espouse a love/ hate relationship with thought. The mind in Buddhist psychology is considered to be a sixth sense organ. However, overreliance upon thinking is not seen as very helpful in the pursuit of happiness or freedom. Inner contemplation and mindfulness are viewed as ce
ntral to that. Meditation training ultimately involves staying attentive to the flow of changing experience, and thoughts are not given special status in the field of awareness. In fact, getting overly involved with the content of thought is detrimental to the cultivation of mindfulness and therefore discouraged.

  Given the cultural differences in views of contemplation, it is surprising that meditation has made significant inroads in the West. Many of us wondered whether it would be another New Age, passing cultural epiphenomenon. How could something thrive here that doesn’t prioritize thinking?

  The most well-known Western definition of mindfulness was originally put forth by Jon Kabat-Zinn, who created the mindfulness-based stress-reduction program: “paying attention, in a particular way, on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.”2 What is this “particular way”? Although this is not specified, I believe it means holding one’s attention on one object after another without conceptual elaboration.

  However, most of us don’t know what it means to be present without conceptual elaboration. Our association to this might be to those moments when we are absorbed in something and lose a sense of ourselves. This is not mindfulness, however, which always includes awareness of what is happening. And given our lack of understanding and familiarity with this mode of attending, we can’t have much faith that being present without thinking could lead to something beneficial, much less transformative.

  The results of this confusion are predictable. When Westerners attempt to practice mindfulness, our efforts are dominated by a cognitive approach. We are determined to figure out meditation, to solve the problem of “awakening.” We have solved other challenging puzzles, and this is next on our agenda. Unfortunately, we are using a tool that doesn’t fit the task at hand.

  Paradoxically, most beginning meditators hold an unexamined assumption that discursive thinking will diminish as meditation deepens. However, because thinking is a part of our wiring, thoughts will not completely stop as we progress in meditation, any more than sounds or physical sensations will disappear. This simple misunderstanding creates internal conflict for most Westerners attempting to practice mindfulness.