I have been trying to express the inexpressible since 2003, when I started teaching meditation. I took on the burden of having to articulate and teach something that is essentially an existential experience of being. It’s like trying to explain the color of blue to someone who has been blind all their life, or trying to describe the taste of an apple to someone who has never had one. One of the biggest problems is that people want to understand meditation intellectually more than they want to experience it directly.
Chogyam Trungpa, an experienced meditation master and Buddhist teacher, used to send his new students to the corner to sit in meditation for twenty minutes before explaining something to them. That way he had something to teach them from their own experience. I have been a tennis coach for many years and it would be like trying to teach someone tennis by talking to them. Intellectually describe how to swing the racket, make contact with the ball and what to do next. But that would never work. I would teach people to play tennis by hitting tennis balls at them and then trying to hit them back.
Meditation is a method, not a philosophy. It has been taught as a method to overcome mental and emotional suffering and find freedom in a world that is inherently changeable and unstable. It has been taught for at least five thousand years and within this time religious intuitions have naturally been built up around it creating a learned class, priests and rigid forms.
Zen Buddhism is often characterized as anti-intellectual because it explicitly attempts to bypass the rational mind and find a place where words are obsolete. Ironically, it attracted the highest breed of intellectuals, because smart people begin to realize the limitations of the mind and language in understanding the true nature of reality. Alan Watts and Jiddu Krishnamurti were two such great intellects who constantly warned about the dangers and pitfalls of knowledge as a means of understanding the world. Watts even coined the phrase “the wisdom of not knowing,” pointing to a transcendent type of knowledge that is not tied to concepts. An oft-quoted Zen master would say:
“To find the truth, you simply give up all your opinions.”
It is in this way that our formal midfulness meditation session is a time to put thoughts and concepts aside for a while and experience another way of being beyond the rational mind.
Buddha also knew the power of thoughts and ideas to shape people’s reality and for the beginning student he would advocate an ethical and loving perspective and say things like “it is your thoughts that create reality” but that is just your reality. It is now clear that shifting your thought perspective can radically change your experience of the world. However, these teachings were intended to help create a peaceful community where people could live in harmony, but they were not the highest teachings on the true nature of reality, even though the fact that your own experience is so malleable begins to suggest what the ultimate reality could be.
Method: Constantly let go of the need to explain or judge your meditation or to look for meaning in experiences. When I asked a great meditation master for a technical meditation point that I thought would both help my practice and demonstrate my great understanding to the teacher, Karma Lhundrup Rinpoche surprisingly responded by singing to me. He said it’s like that Beatles song: ‘Let it be, let it be, let it be, just let it be, whispering words of wisdom; let’s be -ee.”
Okay, I hope you got my point about intellectualizing meditation as an obstacle to transcending words and concepts and getting an instant taste of reality beyond ideas. The second main thing I have discovered why people fail at mindfulness and meditation is that they push too hard with effort and willpower or ego power. Now I understand that part of this problem is teachers like me who say you’re “failing” at mindfulness and meditation because that creates its own kind of neurosis where you think you never get it right and never can, but keep with me.
Beginners are often told to just stick with it and that their meditation will get better over time, but I coach people who have been meditating for twenty years and still struggle with the idea that their meditation must now always be blissful and peaceful, and it’s just not the case.
Once again I have struggled to put into words the effortlessness of meditation, when one of the most popular forms of it, and something I also teach, is mindfulness, which has a clear structure and technique that requires effort and discipline. Mindfulness, however, is a movement that comes from the effort of adapting and effortlessly calming down again. In the beginning it takes a lot of adjusting and less rest. But even during one meditation session, your mind calms down and you move toward the majority of resting quietly and watching your breathing, not having to adjust much at all.
The two training wheels are an adjustment to being off balance, which requires introspection at first to even notice that you are off balance. The two ways to lose your balance are too much excitement or too much boredom. If you are too excited and cannot leave your thoughts alone, adjust and relax yourself and refocus on your breathing or mantra. When you become too sleepy and dull, you should improve your posture, even open your eyes a little and refocus. But what people do wrong here is that they put too much effort into constantly adapting. Once you have refocused and regained your balance, simply pay attention to your breathing and return to an effortless way of being.
In this way you will find your mental balance center and learn to simply be while quietly watching your breathing. If you lose your balance, continually bring yourself back and let go. Just like riding a bike, you’ll get the hang of it, find your balance, and wonder why it was so hard in the first place.
Of course there are other things you can do to improve your mindfulness, see HERE for more mindfulness lessons. But the main two adjustments lie between too excited or boring.
Meditation is increasingly about non-interference and even if you lose your balance slightly, the adjustment is natural and immediate. Once you notice distractions, you have already found your way back to the natural state. So even distractions are okay and it takes little effort to adapt, as my old Tai Chi teacher would say.
“Never wobble, but if you wobble, wobble well.”
I hope it’s clear, I’ve always wanted to include that sentence in a blog and I think it makes sense here, it’s also fun to say a few times.
I also apologize for using the word “failure” in the title, because the effortlessness I’m trying to point out means you shouldn’t force yourself to an ideal of perfection. At the purest level of meditation, there is nothing right and nothing that can go wrong, and it is this all-encompassing, easy state that allows effortlessness and naturalness to truly be present.
To be truly effortless, we must give up our normal ways of problem solving and goal setting and be able to rest in the perfection of the moment, even when it doesn’t seem so perfect. This also requires an aimless and non-striving attitude. When you sit, just sit like a Buddha, already perfect, nothing else to do, nowhere else to reach, so just rest as you are.
So eventually the training wheels come off and your meditation is natural and balanced, even when it isn’t. It is characterized by acceptance, non-interference and a sense of completion. In other words, effortless. All of these things are actually natural to your true nature of consciousness. You don’t have to try to accept it or allow it. It’s exactly what non-conceptual consciousness does. Like a mirror that makes no effort to reflect anything, your consciousness simply knows what is happening without interfering or adjusting anything; it is complete and perfect as it is.
Method: Just sit down and let things be.
Written by Chad Foreman
Chad Foreman is the founder of The Way of Meditation and has been teaching meditation since 2003, determined to bring authentic meditation practices into the lives of millions of people in the modern world. Chad is a former Buddhist monk who lived in a retreat hut for six years and studied and practiced meditation full-time. He now has over twenty years of experience teaching meditation. Chad likes regularly
Meditation retreats on the Sunshine Coast, Australia
Online meditation coachingprovides three online programs – The 21 Day Meditation Challenge to gradually guide people from the basic principles of mindfulness and relaxation to profound states of consciousness.
Breathwork to help manage stress and go deeper into meditation and
The bliss of inner fire This is a Buddhist tantric method to clear energy blockages and connect with the clear light of bliss. You can also get Chad’s free ebook now Insights on the go.