Meditation: "Just Do It" or Careful Study?
Two excerpts from my interview with Samantha Clark at Day By Day Writer:
Me: I learned to meditate from the late Fr. Basil Pennington at St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts. He taught a very simple form of meditation. It consists of repeating a word that you’ve chosen for this purpose – for example, “love,” “peace,” or “God” – and repeating it to yourself each time you exhale.
Samantha: The deep kind of meditation that Paul talks about is something people study for years. If you want to try it, I suggest you study it carefully first.
Speaking personally, everything I learned about meditation going in was contained in a little leaflet - a piece of colored paper folder over three times that Father Basil handed me. So "Repeat the word on exhalation" as per above was about all I knew. But many people learn to meditate in workshops or meditation centers, read up on it pretty extensively beforehand and sometimes practice forms of meditation that are more complicated - for example, with specific postural requirements or recommendations.
What do you think? Careful study or "just do it?" If you've meditated, what was your approach?
Me: I learned to meditate from the late Fr. Basil Pennington at St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts. He taught a very simple form of meditation. It consists of repeating a word that you’ve chosen for this purpose – for example, “love,” “peace,” or “God” – and repeating it to yourself each time you exhale.
Samantha: The deep kind of meditation that Paul talks about is something people study for years. If you want to try it, I suggest you study it carefully first.
Speaking personally, everything I learned about meditation going in was contained in a little leaflet - a piece of colored paper folder over three times that Father Basil handed me. So "Repeat the word on exhalation" as per above was about all I knew. But many people learn to meditate in workshops or meditation centers, read up on it pretty extensively beforehand and sometimes practice forms of meditation that are more complicated - for example, with specific postural requirements or recommendations.
What do you think? Careful study or "just do it?" If you've meditated, what was your approach?
Posted by Paul at 10:29 AM Permalink
25 Comments:
If there is radical openness one cannot but learn. And on the other hand, it must be said that there are dangers in radical openness.
a friend went to a course, but he was told to 'go towards the light'. that sounded scary to me. so that's different.
That was a variation I could understand, although I ended up preferring the “mantra” or repeated word. Most of the rest of what I came across struck me as variations that weren’t meditation in the same sense – more like guided imagery and relaxation exercises.
So all I’ve really learned about meditation came from Fr. Basil’s leaflet and my own experience.
Raymond – Exactly – seemed that way to me, that is, my own mind taught me once I started doing the practice, which is really such a simple thing to understand how to do.
But what are those dangers you refer to?
Tuti – Meditation seems to do nothing for some people. Others find relaxation. Others find relaxation and more – spiritual experiences and for me, over time, becoming more calm and relaxed in my day to day life. In my teens through mid-twenties I had been pretty shy/anxious, and meditation was a big help in getting me past that.
So I think finally it’s a matter of practicing it long enough to find out what it does/doesn’t do for you.
The difference now is to trust myself to just do it. Careful study inevitably requires trusting one's foolish creative mind, or that of another, which is disempowerment as I see it now, just like any kind of borrowed belief or practice that we earnestly impose upon ourselves.
I suppose that I now consider the thirty years of meditation, and the thirty years of confused existence before that which led me to seek such a drastic solution, to have been justified by the joy experienced now. Sixty years of going the wrong way, in order to discover something. For all I know, it's a good bargain, better than I could have hoped for. But I would not suggest anyone followed my footsteps.
I would say "Just do it!" where "it" is not necessarily "meditation", in any recognised form. Just do what your deepest self seems to want. Make mistakes as thoroughly as you can with no half measures. And don't listen to my advice, either.
I find that the level of surrender is what determines the intensity of the mystical disposition. Provisionally surrendering all of my beliefs about the world works very well.
But the mind is prone to despair when it is forced to give up all of its dogma. The threat of meaninglessness can be lethal.
I have had this despairing experience and know others who also have. If it is survived, it is a powerfully useful tool. If not survived, it can ruin your whole day, to say the least.
Meditation can ecstatically free the psyche, and can also make it ill. Perhaps lucky that most people do not do much of it.
Here is an example of a fairly huge surrender:
“O Lord if I worship you out of fear of hell, burn me in hell. If I worship you in the hope of paradise, forbid it to me.” Rabia
Early Islamic Mysticism, Michael Sells, page 163
ciao,
Raymond
(The Yakut people live in Siberia in the basin of the Middle Lena River and the Aldan and Vilyuy rivers.)
“The Yakut Gavril Alekseyev states that each shaman has a Bird-of-Prey-Mother, which is like a great bird with an iron beak, hooked claws and a long tail. This mythical bird shows itself only twice: at the shaman’s spiritual birth, and at his death. It takes his soul, carries it to the underworld, and leaves it to ripen on a branch of a pitch pine. When the soul has reached maturity the bird carries it back to earth, cuts the candidate’s body into bits, and distributes them among the evil spirits of disease and death. Each spirit devours that part of the body that is his share; this gives the future shaman power to cure the corresponding diseases. After devouring the whole body the evil spirits depart. The Bird-Mother restores the bones to their places and the candidate wakes as from a deep sleep.”
(I take this as an allegory/dream experience; an authentic archetypal dynamic manifested in a myth)
1. What do we mean in saying “I meditated?” People might not be referring to the same thing despite using the same word – which wouldn’t be surprising. Using the same word in different ways seems to complicate discussion of religion and spirituality pretty much any time the topic comes up!
For example, one distinction I can personally make is between “trying to meditate” and “meditating.” I tried to meditate for the better part of a year before I ever did. And even after my mind had learned how to meditate, there were plenty of sessions where I didn’t enter it very deeply or only extremely fleetingly.
2. Personal and social context – Where you happen to be with your inner life and what sort of social context surrounds your experience of meditation sounds like it could have a really big impact. For example, Raymond mentions potential problems with meditating while in despair. It literally never occurred to me to meditate when I was despairing - I can have no idea how I would have responded.
I meant to say the emptying of the mind by some forms of meditation can lead to despair. And despair can be quite useful.
ciao,
Raymond
The kind of meditation I tried was the kind taught at the San Francisco Zen Center. The place in Portland was an affilliate of there.
I was pretty depressed around the time I was practicing this because I had just been divorced. I tried it for a few years but I don't think I have the right personality type for it - I hated not thinking, being empty, blank, etc, and I was just not good at meditating.
Crystal – A few years was a good try! As you say, it must be that it doesn’t work for some people, at least during some period of their lives. I know my mom never took to it. The words you use to describe your experience indicate the way it wasn’t working for you. If I tried to describe my experiences, I’d find myself using very different and highly positive language.
For me, I seldom considered it "successful" in the sense of stopping my flow of thoughts except momentarily, or of leading to states of bliss. Essentially it became a religious ritual - in its framework - and a surrender to "whatever", in its effect.
Looking back I would say it was not very nourishing. Nor was it fun---though some continued to claim that it was, and perhaps they spoke their truth.
There were indeed suicides. I know of around six from amongst those whom I had known closely. But there was a sense (and at one time an explicit instruction) to leave no room for doubt in the mind - not to question, I suppose. But what one has to understand is that the movement attracted some pretty desperate people; and the effects of practice - as I now judge - were not as magical or healing as I was conditioned to believe.
When I was initiated (in May 1972) every candidate was vetted for readiness and one of the requirements was to be mentally healthy. No psychiatric examination was involved, merely a brief interrogation from an Indian initiator with a poor command of English culture and language. Only those displaying the grossest signs of mental disorder were rejected.
I know very little about the discipline itself. I assume that one benefit of meditating is that it slows down the thought process so that a person's mind becomes uncluttered. It seems to me that would make it easier for a person to focus on one thing. I guess there are other benefits to it such as relaxation. Maybe meditation has a way of opening the door to the subconscious so that insights can flow from it to the conscious.
The meditation you describe can be called concentration meditation; it the meditation of focusing, on a mantra or a word or a candle or the breath (Anapana) or the body or inquiry (Vipassana) or the sense of I AM.
Hatha Yoga is a moving meditation--just being present during physical movement and stillness, and it can really be applied to any exercise. Pranayama are breathing exercises which some would call mediation, and others would not.
And there is Awareness meditation, which is simply being aware, and allowing and watching thoughts come and go.
Awareness meditation can become effortless and then it's not something to do while sitting on cushion, but simply being all the time.
A good resource is ARO meditation, which is a free, self-directed email course, nicely paced, with excellent simple instructions.
The Vipassana people offer a free ten day course.
I have an ebook on a seven-week graduated self-directed course.
Adyashanti has an excellent book on meditation.
I can't imagine what sort of meditation takes years of study. All techniques are easy to learn, but may take some practice. Just observing thoughts all day long is a great meditation.
I do like yoga, though.
What I try now seems almost the opposite of meditation - imaginative prayer - sort of like guided imagery. At least I get to think :)
But now I have developed my own method based on my learnings.
Anything which works for you is fine.
There are two forms in meditation.One involves looking within and the other opening up outwards.
Great insights in your posts on this topic Vincent. My inner teacher taught me to doubt everything and to love myself for doing so.
Your thoughts on the sacred are also quite astute. I am pretty sure you have heard of the "fools mass." It is a corrective for the abuses of pious gravity.
This wonderful remedy has once again appeared in the modern world: http://dziecitheatre.org/dzfiles/mass2008.html
I agree with what you wrote Paul. A spiritual director can be a blessing or a curse.
Dzieci: Fools Mass at La MaMa and The Cell
I never got where you were coming from on meditation in the past – I do now. Sounds like an unfortunate and literally misguided experience.
SusieQ – After reading Vincent's comment, now yours, and a number of other people's comments in past threads, I'm starting to think I should have become a guru, lol! Meditation’s effects run in the opposite direction from shutting down your experience of the world. And when I look at Vincent’s comment, it sounds like instructors sometimes surround meditation with a bunch of – stuff – that has nothing to do with meditation itself, which is extremely simple to try out.
I’m starting to think that often the reason meditation doesn’t work for people is because of how it’s presented.
Kaushik – Me too – that is, my impression even of relatively complicated forms of meditation is that they’re simple procedures. What takes years isn’t studying them but, if they start to work for you, practicing them to greater and greater effect in your life.
Thanks for the summary/overview. The different approaches strike me as means to the same end, which is finding out what your mind can do when you give it a break from inner chatter.
Crystal – All major religions appear to have contemplative (meditative) traditions – for example, Islamic Sufism and Christian mysticism. But I have the impression that the contemplative side has more prominence in eastern than western religion.
This might just be the stuff I’ve happened to read – for all I know, in actual practice eastern as well as western religions may emphasize doctrine, non-contemplative forms of prayer, and ritual in the lives of the majority of their adherents.
Guided imagery is one of those things that sometimes get lumped together under the “meditation” heading, so I think it’s helpful that you make the distinction. People often refer to various forms of quiet reflection and thought as meditation. While all these things are valuable, I think it muddies the waters to use “meditation” to refer to relaxing ways of using imagination and thought as well as practices meant to still imagination and thought.
Desperado – That was my experience too. After I was taught the basics, I made adjustments here and there – for example, sessions “at least two times a day” just didn’t make sense to me, I didn’t have that much time, and once a day worked fine. And eventually I stopped repeating a word and just focused on each exhalation – that was after some years and my concentration had improved.
If you find yourself modifying a practice in some way, making it your own, that’s probably a good sign that it’s working.
Raymond, thanks for the link --
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