How could doing nothing be valued over those?

The trick of it is that “do nothing,” the instruction, tells you little about the hallucinatory, profound things that happen if you let yourself come to a stop.

When someone with a regimented practice that’s gone stale comes to me for advice, one suggestion I almost always give is, “see if you can just do nothing for an hour.” If I feel like elaborating, I might say, “let your attention settle into a natural groove of open receptivity. Be like a cat, with a delicate, broad awareness taking in the whole environment, inner and outer. Let all intention go beyond this extremely light intention.”

Frequently, I then receive a text message explaining that they’ve had an immensely powerful experience, and they sometimes attribute wizard powers to me. But I am no wizard. I am simply aware of the power of Nothing, having made Nothing practice the main anchor of my contemplative life for half a decade now. I like other things, but I always come back to Nothing.

I’m wary of trying to describe the powerful experiences of Nothing Practice, because I’m liable to induce a classic meditation fuckup: practicing results rather than method. Which is to say: you can easily go wrong in meditation by trying to make your mind do the after picture. For example, awareness of breathing practice tends to produce peace and rapture, but not if you monitor your mind and try to force it into a state of pretend peace and fake rapture.

So don’t try to duplicate what I am writing below. Take it as a disclosure of the possibilities. Your practice may not resemble what I subsequently describe.

Nevertheless. Here is something like what your mind might naturally do, if you simply practice Nothing without expectation—the results that might accrue over an hour if you attend to the delicate labor of non-intention:

1. Find a posture that balances alertness and comfort.

2. For 5-15m, settle into a natural, nice-feeling groove of present-moment attention, neither pushing away nor grabbing onto thoughts and emotions.

3. Notice a natural clarity beginning to arise, which feels strangely blissful.

4. Notice, on the edges, a troubling feeling lurking—something like the fear of death, or shame about previous misdeeds.

5. Let it approach you, allow a disowned feeling that’s quietly dominated your entire life.

6. Feel that you will certainly die, for several minutes.

7. Discover that even within the heart of the dreaded feeling, you can find clarity and peace, in a part of you that has never changed.

8. Realize, for a moment, that you don’t ever need to be afraid, because nothing can touch your fundamental consciousness.

9. For a few seconds, spontaneously drop into a timeless stillness outside identity, Nothing itself, and find it shockingly fresh and beautiful.

10. Go “what the fuck is that,” try to grab onto it, lose it.

11. Know that you will begin your next practice by attempting to recreate this moment of timeless stillness, laugh at your own silliness.

12. End the sit refreshed, amazed, confused.

With more practice, your Nothing sits might start to look like this:

1. Settle into your customary posture, which feels like rejoining a friend.

2. Slip into a state of deep, pleasant tranquility, after 5-10m of allowing your sub-minds to quiet.

3. Contact the fact that many layers of conscious experience taken to be essential—the sense of self, time, space—are actually produced by habitual mental action.

4. Watch these habitual mental actions slow, and, sometimes, halt.

5. Rest in a space beyond concept that feels impersonal and yet universal; the home at the heart of Being.

6. Rejoice that the Nothing you once compulsively fled is an endlessly refreshing font of creation that can be found in every sensation.

7. Leave the sit but take the Nothing with you, find it everywhere, “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.” Feel it in your lover’s mouth when you kiss. See it in the thunderclouds in the sky. Realize that you were never separate from God, that this idea is completely laughable. You’re separate from God like a painting is separate from the canvas.

And with, say, years of practice, the walls between this technique and life might start to fall down, such that your “practice” looks like this:

1. Rest in presence, which is at every moment the origin of being, in any situation, in movement and rest, in disturbance and tranquility.

2. Be grateful that you can have a mystical experience in line at Trader Joe’s.

But there are some issues that might stop you from getting there. I can’t name them all, but here are a few:

Common failure modes in embracing Nothing:

Having a fulfilling Nothing practice requires an equal embrace of all present sensation. It is welcoming association, not dissociation. But without realizing it, many Nothing practitioners are subtly distancing from disfavored sensations—difficult emotions, sexual urges, etc. If the practice feels dry and dead, rather than pulsating and alive, this is probably what’s happening. Try to intentionally lean into the difficulty and the emotion. I will not report you to the Zen police if you do Nothing but subtly raise the salience of the heart space. Alternatively, engage in a practice involving intentional cultivation of emotion, spontaneity, etc.

If you have too much coarse emotional/intellectual disturbance to find a natural “groove” of resting in sensation, if your mind is still bucking crazily 15-20m in, it might not be the time for Nothing practice. Try more focused absorption practice, like heart practice, or mantra practice—there’s plenty of good concentration techniques. If those are experienced as primarily negative, it might be time for therapy or IFS or confronting that thing you’ve been avoiding. Or just asking: “why might I have a fucked up relationship with rest and enjoyment?”

If you catch yourself fighting your mind, trying to squeeze out all distraction and randomness in mental activity, remember the priceless Shinzen Young pointer: “If you can’t drop it, it’s not an intention.” His video on Nothing practice is excellent.

If you still catch yourself fighting your mind, try on the frame that you are letting God meditate you. Surrender can be a helpful pointer here.

If there’s something on your mind that you don’t have the resources to confront alone—a big feeling or trauma—then don’t try this at home. Nothing practice is psychologically thorough: all of your stuff will come up, in an order not determined by you.

If you can’t adopt a spacious, open awareness on command, try some Loch Kelly cues, or this great Alexander Technique course. If none of that works, your ego might be trying to keep a lid on something—and that might be adaptive in your current situation.

If you want to read more, I like the “natural meditation” section of Angelo Dilullo’s book, and A Trackless Path remains a classic.

If Nothing practice feels spacey and disembodied, try getting in touch with consciousness within the body before orienting towards stillness and non-intention; Realization Process has great exercises along these lines.

If there’s a lot of energy in your body, try non-directed body movement, the “do nothing” practice where you let your animal body steer. I am forever in Corey Hess’ debt for introducing me to this practice, which was pivotal in helping me confront emotional difficulty.

And finally:

Nothing practice can feel bracing, confusing, intense. But it ought to feel good—like an engaging encounter with the mystery of being, not like a chore. If it’s not feeling good for you for whatever reason, come back to it after taking up a more active practice. Nothing will always be there.

When it’s going well, you may ask “am I doing it right?” The core of Nothing practice is to make contact with what cannot be made explicit, a knowing outside of concept. Your explorations will contain delicate variation that can’t possibly be articulated. If you find yourself having a hard time explaining why your Nothing practice is so fulfilling, you are probably on the right track.

Ultimately, though, when I’m assessing someone’s work, I try to ask the following question. Is this teacher, pastor, therapist, facilitator, coach, whatever, on average, according to my best guess, moving people closer to liberation, or further away?

And there aren’t actually many spiritual teachers who are so bad that their effect on the world is definitely net negative. Even some of the looniest loose cannons on the scene, the most corrupt and megalomaniacal (Jeffery Martin) often have positive effects on balance. The wisdom of Chögyam Trungpa lives on, even though he was massively unethical at times. Spiritual teachers aren’t competing versus a wise mass culture. They are competing versus TikTok and Fox News, popular astrology and fad diets. It takes work to be worse than that.

This doesn’t mean we should automatically forgive horrible conduct. As individuals, we ought to strive for exemplary behavior, and expect the same of others who do spiritual work.

However, there is the following question. Who do we need out there, if we want to awaken all beings? My answer is:

We need everyone.

Frequently, I hear backchannel spiritual community gossip along the lines of: “I tried studying with teacher A, but they had such obvious blind spots. Then teacher B straightened me out.” Later, I then hear the same story, but reversed, where teacher B is the obviously blinkered one, whose faults were illuminated by the teachings of teacher A.

We need teacher A and teacher B.

We need the spiritually gifted Mormon sex therapists. We need the heterodox bodyworkers and the near-psychic embodiment wizards. We need contemplative accounts from Christian mystics and stridently atheist polyamorists. We need pricy spiritually-flavored executive coaching programs. We need old-school Theravada teachers who are not for sale at any price.

We need psychedelic dropouts, and people who correctly point out that drugs can’t be the ultimate answer. We need spiritually-informed psychotherapists who urge the meditators to look at content, and meditators who encourage the therapycels to ignore their stories sometimes, or look at the emotions underneath.

We need Neo-Tantra weirdos to teach people emotional release and butt exercises, and we need DBT therapists to teach emotional regulation and theory of mind.

We need IFS artistes to provide space for others to encounter their parts and achieve greater inner coherence. We need Zen teachers who can remind people to just be open and quit it with the fragmentation.

We need scientists working avidly, providing the neural correlates of awakening. We need irascible naysayers who point out that awakening is probably not something that can be fully mapped by scientific understanding.

We need non-dual YouTube influencers with cringe taste in video effects. We really need Frank Yang to make many more videos. We need Cheetah House to help with meditation side effects caused when unbalanced people get too high on spirituality content.

We need the massively scaled meditation hucksters who claim that their techniques work for everyone. We need the angry blog posts by people who point out that these techniques do not, in fact, work for everyone, and that real spiritual work doesn’t survive scale.

We need autistic teachers who carve up the contemplative landscape into a million sub-techniques, like Shinzen Young, and poetic teachers who tell you to just relax and wake up, like Adyashanti.

Sometimes, I hear complaints about the overabundance of professional spiritual types. Well, I’m in Berkeley, the white hot center of it, and I can tell you that we are nowhere near saturation on effective meditation teachers, or spiritual workers generally. I don’t have enough good people in my referral network.

Meanwhile, lots of smart, informed people still don’t believe in jhana. That’s like not believing that ibuprofen is real.

I think I’ll believe we are saturated when awakening is viewed, in popular culture, like noob gains in lifting. It is commonly understood that a novice lifter can double their strength within months of training, that’s in the water. There’s plentiful information about all the different programs you can do, and how to rehab injuries you might get along the way. Sure, there are arguments about the best method. But a general picture has cohered, and is common knowledge. Awakening isn’t there yet. Not nearly. I’d like to ask people on the street what they think of spiritual awakening, and hear the response, “Yeah, I know I could open my heart and relieve something like 90% of my suffering and be much happier and more prosocial if I did some years of serious spiritual practice. I understand that I can have a deep relationship with the transcendent that can transform me and my relationships and all of my perceptions, I know that’s out there for me.”

I believe enough in the intelligence of the world that, through the existence of more and more spiritual voices, rough points of consensus will emerge that could massively benefit humankind.

We’re not there yet. We need you to help us get there, even if I find you personally annoying.

Try it now. One minute. If you like that, add more minutes. See if the emotion can enter and pervade the breath like incense.

This framing is designed to counter the main failure mode of heart practice, which is to make it aspirational. People hear about “loving-kindness” practice and they think, “alright, time to pretend I have the emotions of Jesus, time to love dictators.” You may get there, but you have to begin with your average post-industrial heart.

Take the emotions that already sweeten your life in small quantities, and notice that they multiply when given delicate attention. If the phrase “may all beings be happy” has zero here-and-now resonance for you, ignore it. Instead, pick up the appreciation for how music sounded when you were in college. Or the bittersweet transience re: the beloved friends who are off living separate lives somewhere. Gratitude that you are still allowed to be in society despite your previous failings. Whatever is effortlessly opening when you turn towards it internally. I also introduce heart practice as “corny feelings” practice. You have at least one of those within reach, right?

If your mind is jumpy, try conjuring a feeling out of a jumpy series of impressions. For awhile, I really enjoyed thinking of all the people in my life fleetingly, inwardly repeating “good job,” until I was awash in enough feeling to hold it as a concentration object. The technique that works for you might be stupid.

If your experience is tinged with sadness, that is fine. Also, I disagree with traditional Buddhist guides that tell you never to confuse heart practice with romantic or sexual feelings. Pick whatever is rich and involving as an object, right now—as long as you can stay with the feeling itself and not any attached fantasies. Stay with the feeling. And gently notice how pleasant and engaging that is, sliding into a relaxed flow state. That’s all you need to do.

When the feeling is large enough that you can let it overtake you like a tidal wave, do that. Let the feeling start steering. Getting there involves mastering your emotional system, which is more like befriending an animal than following a recipe. Force won’t work. Gently experiment with different coaxing. You will learn, in time, what stirs you. Some people, I’m told, get blissed out by remembering their favorite equations.

It might be completely insane, what happens to you. Heart practice is a great onramp to jhanas, the druggy bliss states you may have heard about. If you do heart practice for some years, as your main meditation or as a supplement, you might find yourself default loving everyone, even the people who annoy you. Approaching strangers as if you love them, because you do, has an effect. You’ll empathize even with your enemies as you are smiting them. With significant training, MDMA will seem like a mostly superfluous compound, just a stimulant atop your normal emotional spectrum. (Really.) You won’t be blissful 24/7, challenging emotions will still arise. But you can get closer than most people would believe possible to embracing everything, while still functioning sensibly.

You don’t have to believe me, any more than people who go to the gym have to believe that, with repeated application of resistance, the average person becomes muscular. You just have to show up. Feel what is rich and involving today, on many days.

If there aren’t any rich feelings available, you might be tensed up in a state of resentment. Try this forgiveness meditation, or try having the difficult conversation you’ve been postponing.

If there’s a big screaming billboard of anxiety or shame in the way of any other emotion, and you’re mentally stable overall, try focusing on the screaming billboard as if it’s a positive sensation that you want to appreciate every detail of. Just the physical parts of the sensation, not the interpretations. Could be cool, this book might help.

If you’re not afraid of the G-word, try the feeling that results from the phrase “remember that God loves you.”

If you’re sick of feeling positive emotion alone, if that feels a little insular and masturbatory, try tonglen. I fucking love tonglen.

There may be side effects to heart practice.

What side effects?

Meditation side effects generally fall into two categories.

The first category, not typically caused by heart practice, is perceptual weirdness—for example, after dry vipassana, where you carve sensation up into its constituent parts, sometimes reality will feel buggy, like a stuttering film strip.

The second category is “congratulations, you have been forced to do some helpful therapy.” Material is produced which has to be worked on. Mostly, the side effects of heart practice are like that. Behold these oscillating cones:

Distraction gets an undeservedly bad reputation. It’s a helpful method of concealing difficult things we don’t yet wish to confront. ADD behavior is an emotional regulation strategy, and subtler forms of distraction are useful ways of obscuring, say, the knowledge of death and transience.

After heart practice, your attention will be more open and stable, so you’ll contact the difficult parts of the human experience. Luckily, you’ll be armored with a sense of love and safety after a good sit. But the emotional glow won’t necessarily persist—so you might have to encounter these difficult sensations without that armoring. This can be done, but it’s intense, and you’ll have to feel out your capacity as you go. It’s like being sent out on a mountain with a pack full of delicious food. Halfway up you might run out of lunch and find yourself hungry out there. Before doing intensive heart practice, make sure you have someone who can support you when you’re halfway up, a teacher or friend or therapist or parent or whoever, someone who can hear your tantrums. If you can’t allow yourself vulnerability, I don’t advise this practice.

If you find yourself taking on too much, feel free to re-enter distraction. Most people are experts in checking out—draw on that skill when necessary. Have some carbs and video games until you develop more equanimity.

There is a far side beyond, where every sensation can be met with open tenderness. Heart practice will get you moving in that direction. Complete intimacy with all experience is an unusual place to live from. You will be, in some facets of your emotional experience, unrelatable to many people. This is the tradeoff; you will know that, at bottom, the mind is wonderful, in a culture that frantically tries to persuade you that life is essentially tragic. You will enter the small weird team of happy people.

Photo credit goes to Daido Moriyama.

If you are not one of those people, but you’d like to learn more about meditation of this sort, I’d recommend reading:

Original Love by Henry Shukman

The Science of Enlightenment by Shinzen Young

These resources are good if you’re just starting a meditation practice:

Some people find this essay I wrote helpful

This short essay is incredibly good

Tucker’s book is great

Charlie’s book is great

If you’ve started having profound spiritual experiences, and you haven’t read End of Your World, do yourself a favor and go read it. It’s pithy, fun, and deeply helpful, perhaps the only really accurate book about the deep end of meditation practice. Adyashanti is one of the most important humans in my life even though we’ve never met, and I know a bunch of other meditators who feel the same way.

The following short essays are written in the spirit of this great/bizarre meditation resource, which I partially agree with, but, moreso, admire. (It’s huge and forbidding, but has some amazing passages—search for “The state, process, and physical environment of the system are also its plans and goals.” for the beginning of a particularly inspired moment.)

The keep it up game

Sometimes, I think the spiritual path is really complicated. There are all these diverse skills to master, layers of ego to work through, constant opportunities to attempt a more ethical life, or wonder how to do so.

And then sometimes I think it’s actually very simple. What you are trying to do is lose a game.

You know those keep-it-up games that all children naturally reinvent? Where the floor is lava and you need to keep hitting a balloon or a ball so it doesn’t hit the floor?

The vast majority of humans are wired to play a game like this with experience. Raw experience is scary. There might be a lot of emotions down there. Perhaps there’s less control than you think there is. Perhaps you are a little fucked up inside, and not living up to your values. There’s also the fact of ever-present transience, which reminds us how soon we will vanish, along with everything we hold dear.

Reasonably, we avoid going there. And so we play a keep-it-up game. We kick the balloon of mind away from bare experience. Masters of this game spend days relitigating arguments that already happened, or arguments that haven’t happened yet. Or watching short form video constantly, or compulsively optimizing themselves in some fashion. Whatever it takes to get away from the gritty immediacy of being here.

Perhaps this is unsatisfying to you. And so you take up meditation, or another form of slowing down, and get a little worse at the keep-it-up game. You get closer to bare experience, and start noticing how painful and tight your avoidance mechanisms are. You start having more and more interactions with the fullness of emotion, which is wrenching and wonderful.

Some people then wonder: hey, how deep does this go? And they read a bunch of books about spirituality, and master a bunch of meditation techniques. Experience becomes amazingly psychedelic, and you find out that this psychotechnology has endured through millennia for a reason. It is undeniably potent.

But at this point you are still playing the game. The balloon is allowed to get pretty close to the ground, but every time it almost drops, there is a reassertion of identity. Like: “I’m so open to my emotions now, wow, it’s a shame that not everyone is like me.” Or: “My awareness is so expansive and beautiful, surely this is the spiritual awakening that I’ve been told about.” Each of these assertions is a subtle tap on the balloon that propels it upwards just long enough. This is a reasonable place to hang out.

But perhaps, one day, by the grace of God, you lose the game. The balloon hits the floor. Which feels like it should result in annihilation—the destruction of your precious identity as a meditator, along with the destruction of everything else. You lost the game! Isn’t the game all there is?

Strangely, though, life does not end with this annihilation. Instead, life is beautifully renewed by the hilarious knowledge of this game you’ve been playing, the whole time. It becomes extraordinarily funny how much your default setting was to flee from beauty, relief, and joy. Your whole life was about making yourself happy and you were not even good at it.

From then, you can do whatever you want. My life looks pretty similar to what it was before I lost the game. I am just more eager to help, because I’m aware of how painful the game is, and now that I’m not as busy playing it, I have more energy for other people.

I still kick the balloon around, because you sort of have to, to get along in society. But it feels lighter and easier when it’s not life and death, it’s just a balloon.

You actually do have to want it

Occasionally you will hear someone spiritual say, “spiritual ambition is dumb, you shouldn’t be meditating to get things,” or “just accept how everything is now.” To which I say, lol, lmao. Like obviously you actually want something out of spiritual practice, right? You want to have a completely different relationship with this life, and building this relationship requires real work. Without a spiritual yearning, you would not be practicing (or paying attention to my opinions about practice, certainly). “The secret is not wanting anything” is nonsense.

…On one level! But on another level, statements like this are extremely helpful: as practice pointers. The aim of statements like these is to avoid the failure mode of future-oriented meditative practice. In future-oriented practice, which is typically destructive, you are trying to aggressively bend your bodymind into a different shape, the shape you think it ought to be when you become spiritual, rather than lovingly meeting your bodymind where it is, thus changing your relationship to it.

So how do we find the synthesis between these points of view? It’s actually simple. The spiritual yearning, the desperate want for something else? Treat these as present-moment phenomena to be welcomed, opened to, examined, lovingly encountered. That want to be somewhere else is fascinating, if you start looking at it, really looking at the sensations composing that yearning. Where do you think you’re going?

A mundane view of the powers

Here’s a message I heard from serious meditators: “hey, you might get spiritual powers from meditation. But they’re a peril and a distraction more than anything. Just keep sitting.” I always thought this was woo-woo hogwash. And then it happened to me, but not like I expected. And it turned out to be an important warning.

How do I understand this now? Well, let’s say that on the meditative path, you are switching between two reward functions, two ways of gaining satisfaction.

Default reward function: “I have to get what I want to get! I just have to. That’s the important thing.”

Spiritual reward function: “All will be well. All manner of things will be well. Implicit in this is the realization that me and my wants are not so ultimately important, this identity is just an outfit.”

Since the meditative path gives you real benefits—like increased emotional intelligence, a greater ability to be present with people, etc—sometimes you will unlock an ability that makes it much easier for you to fulfill your default reward function. Like intense powers of concentration, or greater charisma, or something like that. This will create a natural temptation to become a cool spiritual person who is good at fulfilling your wants that way. And there’s nothing wrong with this, as a phase to hang out in for a bit, maybe a few years if you want. But it’s much less pleasant, in my experience, than moving to the latter reward function, which involves deeply interrogating your wants, in a way that requires humiliating self-honesty.

A huge amount of the New Age scene is people stuck in this cul de sac.

Your ego structure just will co-opt the spiritual path

You might read the above essay and think, “aha, great, I just won’t let my spiritual search be hijacked by my ego-level wants!” The bad news is it doesn’t work like that. How it works is that your ego structure will co-opt the spiritual path, and in the process, you will learn so much about the pain inherent in that way of being, and thus become increasingly willing to choose something else.

For example, as an Enneagram 7 with a side of 3, I was after two things in the spiritual path, not always consciously:

1. To always have fun/good experiences

2. To be a cool shiny spiritual person

And meditation gave me some of those things! But imperfectly. Oh no! You cannot always make your experience good, no matter how skilled you are as a meditator. And the more validation you get, the more you’re aware of the pain of lack that’s driving the search for validation. So I was brought into deeper and deeper contact with my stupidity, until release felt like a more tempting option than carrying on the way I had been.

I think there is no escaping this kind of self-confrontation.

In favor of insane Southeast Asian high standards

The phrase “enlightened” or “awakened” is, confusingly, used to refer to these two things.

1. Someone who has been through a particular mental event—a massive reduction in the part of consciousness that could be called “the separate self,” typically resulting in a shocking increase in well-being, and a dramatic change in perspective on life.

2. Someone who has reached a state of unusual moral perfection.

Being 1 is rare, but less rare than being a chess grandmaster—certainly tens of thousands, and maybe hundreds of thousands of people qualify, by my estimation. I’ve now met dozens of people who meet criterion 1, and I am one of them myself. Some are unusually wonderful people. Some are more neurotic than average, or complete lunatics.

2 is obviously much rarer. Sometimes, 2 is formalized in a title, as in the “arahant” in Buddhism, which I roughly understand as designating someone who is never superfluously an asshole, ever. People whose opinion I trust have told me that there are maybe a few of these people alive at any given time, like under ten. I know a few elder teachers who I’d guess are approaching the zip code.

From this perspective, I’m in favor of 2 being the goal, and 1 being considered a laudable credential, like a PhD, that prepares you to do serious work. If you have experienced the abundant joy and ease of the separate self departing, and you’re not actively concerned about how to give your gifts away—in whatever way that means for you personally—I’m really confused by your priorities.

I think sometimes people downplay the idea of working towards unusual moral perfection because the idea can invite neuroticism. But this is, as the kids say, a skill issue. We can all acknowledge that it’s possible to be much more loving, kind, skillful, patient, wise, etc, than we are, and that there are concrete steps we can take in this direction, without constantly chastising ourselves or being dishonest about our remaining flaws. We can also acknowledge that we can be much better without opting into all of the trappings of what exactly that means in a renunciate religious context. (I like Chapman’s nobility.)

1 makes 2 more possible, in my experience, by making it more painful when you’re an asshole. The freedom of the spiritual path is a freedom from the desire to do massive amounts of self-interested clinging. However, sometimes people become dharma teachers, accumulate acolytes who fawn over them, and cut off the possibility of receiving real feedback, and stagnate or worse.

Anything can be a defense against any other thing

Sometimes, people who notice how their minds work start thinking: “Aha! Thoughts are so tricky and elusive! As long as I’m staying with my embodied emotions, I won’t deceive myself.” Alas, the ego is tremendously good at avoiding things, and can use anything as a defense against any other thing. You can use a thought to defend yourself against an emotion, or an emotion as a defense against a thought. Or an emotion as a defense against another emotion. Or you can put an emotion outside, into the world, as a defense against feeling something inside (projection.) Etc etc etc.

Thus, woe unto the meditator who believes that the key to awakening is “embodiment” or “emotional release” or “attunement” or “samadhi” or “memory reconsolidation” any specific state or attribute or benefit. Sure, these are nice precursors, and accessing them will likely be part of the trip. Memory reconsolidation, specifically, can clear up everyday cognition to a shocking extent. But the trip isn’t about any of that specifically — it’s finally about something so terrifyingly simple that you don’t want to see it. Extended periods of samadhi will make it likelier that you see it, but not if you fetishize concentration. The thing you’re looking for is part of every state, but it transcends all of them.

And any state can be used to avoid awakening. And you will avoid awakening, because it is terrifying to the ego structure. That is part of the journey—the terror, and the resistance. The resistance that tends to naturally decrease as you get increasingly sick of your own shit, and thus desirous of an alternative.

The switchback

There is a really weird property to the meditation arc. It is unlike anything else I know of in skill acquisition.

Let’s decompose the meditation path into two steps.

1. Get really good at skilled state cultivation. Really relax for the first time in your life. Develop equanimity, fill yourself with bliss, absorb the cosmic pain and transmute it into pure love, tune into spaciousness. Wow yourself with how psychedelic experience can become. Maybe get some fun side benefits, like telepathy-level empathy, or a reduced need for sleep. Do self-inquiry until self/other duality falls away.

2. Radically let go of thinking that states are important at all. Let the spirit do whatever it wants with you. (You might notice that you were always doing this, you just didn’t know it.) Give up on getting anything from the meditative path except your completely normal life. Accept death completely.

Notice how weird this is? It’s a complete reversal! In an interview with Michael Taft, Tucker Peck analogized this movement to how a musician starts out playing scales, but graduates to “just feel the music, man.” This comparison is helpful, but it’s weirder than that. It’s as if becoming a great racer, at some point, involved getting out of your car and joining someone else’s pit crew.

I don’t imagine that there’s an exact recipe for deciding when it’s time to make the switch. Some people quite quickly acquire the insight necessary to understand what letting go actually means, and the resources necessary to do it. Some people, like me, take a much longer period of time.

For me, it was a somewhat disturbing change in direction—I was really indignant that no particular state held the key, that there was nothing I could do, but simply let go until the letting go worked its way through my entire bodymind, as my life fell into alignment with the path (or vice versa). The phrase “nothing needs to be done” was deeply upsetting to me, and deeply moving. I held it as a mantra in all of my waking hours.

This is also where it helped, personally, to be unafraid of the G-word, which is to say, God. It was helpful to take the perspective that none of my spiritual path was my work at all—this made it easier to allow the remaining work to do itself.

The waiting room

Anyway, related to the switchback: after the stage when it mostly becomes about letting go, many meditators arrive at an odd time in practice before the self-making engine is unmade. In this phase, there’s a high level of meditative skill, and a lot of insight, but it’s not clear where to go next. Like: self/other duality is nearly gone, there is a fairly relaxed sense of doership, emotional experience is high-definition. But you know you still haven’t experienced the Great Unmaking. You maybe try and talk yourself into thinking you’ve got it. But then you chat with people who have been through it, and there’s something in their eyes, like the quality of someone haunted by war, but the opposite of that. And you know you aren’t quite on their wavelength yet.

What to do then? The traditional advice is to simply do a bunch of shikantaza and wait for the thing to unmake itself. Or to go on retreat and get your concentration revved up. But I was rewarded by a different approach. I started assuming that the sense of self was hanging on for a logical reason, and I started to ask terrifying questions about that reason.

Questions like:

• Hey, have you ever managed to successfully avoid suffering for even one day? Really, if you’re being honest with yourself?

• What is your worst motivation for spiritual practice, and what if you will always have corrupt motivations like this?

• What if you still don’t understand the basic nature of suffering?

• What are you hoping spirituality will let you get away with?

• What part of your identity depends on being a spiritual person, or someone who is seeking?

• What if you got absolutely nothing from the spiritual search?

These questions surfaced psychological resistance to work with directly.

Obviously this is not the only approach. One person told me he got out of the waiting room by simply hearing and really trying to understand the phrase “you are trying too hard.”

At this stage, the path itself is often used as a defense against letting go.

Sexuality is an under-discussed piece of the puzzle

Assuming that the whole of the path is habituation to openness, to paraphrase Andrew Holecek. Like being open to what is, and dropping all of your resistance to what is going on. For many people, “resistance to what is going on” will include some number of sexual hangups. This can include being ashamed of one’s sexuality, shame around prior sexual experiences, excessive attachment to the idea of sexual conquest or one’s attractiveness, and many many others.

To put it another way, disembodiment is an intelligent strategy if you have some automatic rejection of sexual energies, urges, and associated feelings. Those are a substantial component of embodied experience! Being in presence is threatening if your sexuality is even a little bit alive and you’re not okay with it.

I’ve found it extremely powerful to simply work with sexual hangups and feelings the way I would work with anything else. Like: greeting sexuality with more equanimity, treating sexual feelings as doorways to jhanic states, bringing open loving awareness to sexual shame, et cetera.

Many meditators don’t talk about how powerful and important this can be. There are three reasons, I think:

1. Sex is awkward and taboo to begin with, and there are some Buddhist cultural hangups in the meditation world.

2. If you introduce sexual stuff to your meditation group, it’s easy to accidentally do a sex cult. On the 1:1 level, introducing sexuality into a teaching relationship requires care, and many teachers, reasonably, do not want to go there.

3. Few of us want to be confused with the neo-tantra nerds, for whom sexuality is a Special Interest, who always have horny energy. I happen to like a lot of these people, but they are not normal, and thus not aspirational for many meditators.

And so, the possibility of bringing sexuality into practice is under-discussed (in some circles). But if you don’t want to be a monastic and go for the “shut it off” option, you are going to have to work with your sexuality. Which simply means trying to experience it without resistance, and also trying to incorporate it into an ethical life, as a vessel for connection, and a set of energies that bring us into contact with creation. (May I suggest marriage as a spiritual practice?)

What the happiness without conditions means

I’d always misread the phrase “the happiness without conditions.” I took it to mean a kind of happiness that persists no matter what life throws at you. I have come to a different conclusion. It refers to the happiness that arises if, and only if, you stop putting conditions on life.

Future essays to come, maybe, on request:

• The shocking power of the Diamond Sutra

• Non-dual glimpse practice as Legend of Zelda map destination

• Some species of energy shit I’ve seen out there

Photo credit goes to Daido Moriyama.

Meditation is about more than one thing. But if it were just about one thing, it would be releasing mental tension so you can fully feel your experience. All of the fancy insights you are trying to get from meditation become nakedly obvious, in due time, once you drop inhibitions to feeling what is already going on. The same insights are available at the office or the monastery, when you allow yourself to see them.

You might be like: but what about distraction, aren’t I supposed to be staying focused? Yes. Continuity of attention is good. Enough continuity will likely rocket you into some wonderful bliss state, if that’s what you’re into. And the distraction that keeps you from establishing this is typically an automatic flinch. Relax all the flinching and you will find progressively expanding stillness, which you can point in some direction if you want to. The quality of a mind that is not being messed with constantly is tranquil, assuming that basic survival is taken care of.

There are sources of mental tension that meditators often don’t notice because they are simply accepted as background activities/properties of the mind. It’s not clear, until you learn to turn them off, that they are optional. But they are optional, and toggling them off is necessary to experience the profound depths of practice.

This is not a “meditation 101” post. For that, go here.

Tracking/predicting experience, rather than being open to possibility

We have an automatic tendency to monitor ongoing experience and predict the next moment. Mentally, this creates a sense of wariness or watchfulness, which is a layer of tension. Also, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: the mental intention to predict experience keeps experience predictable by reducing your sensitivity to variation.

Helpful tricks:

• Notice if there’s a moment of relaxation, or a pause in mental activity, after you think “I don’t know what will happen next,” or “I can’t predict experience.” See if you can ease into that pause.

• Notice how there is constant detail in sensory experience that you can’t predict. The next thought, the next flicker of body sensation, the next shade of emotion. Relax into the flow, allow yourself to be drawn in by the unpredictable flux of subtlety.

• See if you can let the breath drive itself, by responding naturally to the desire for oxygen rather than trying to keep your breath predictable, while maintaining mindfulness.

Reaching out and grabbing experience, rather than receiving experience

There is an unconscious tendency to direct attention to specific portions of experience—to mentally “squint” at what we’re looking at, for example. This is not actually necessary for perception. In meditation, it is typically more helpful to enter a mode of holistic, receptive experiencing, where we let the field of experience come to us.

Helpful tricks:

• Play with the prompt “I am a puddle, and experience is the rain.” (Thanks to Hormeze for the inspiration.)

• Notice that you are already listening without the decision to listen. See if you can do this with all of your senses.

• Allow your awareness to be broad and inclusive: lightly include both your head and your feet in experience. A wide aperture of awareness naturally creates a receptive mode.

Having a frantic pace of intending

Many intentions function best when held lightly. For example, when you’re walking to a destination, you typically don’t need to remind yourself to keep walking every few feet—you only need to remind yourself if you get distracted by something and stop walking. The intentional savoring required by focused meditation practice (like jhana practice, for example) is one of these intentions best held lightly: it is a direction we allow ourselves to move in. However, many novice meditators engage in the frantic renewal of intention, reminding themselves constantly of what they ought to be doing. Not helpful!

Helpful tricks:

• Reduce the pace and intensity of voluntary mental action. If the mind is chaotic in the short term, trust that this will settle down as you relax into pleasant feelings.

• Do the unhelpful thing intentionally, so you can get a feel for the helpful thing. Frantically issue a few mental commands to yourself—voluntarily engage yourself in thought repeatedly at a fast pace. Notice the turbulence this creates. Then, try to do the opposite: see if you can smoothly, slowly connect with one mental intention.

• Try, for a period, to completely let go of voluntary mental action. See what it’s like to have faith that the mind can settle itself, if you don’t shake it. (This may take some minutes, and may not happen if mental activity is particularly intense. It is also a whole style of meditation.)

Evaluating whether or not certain things are supposed to be happening in meditation

Mental movements that get in the way of absorption, sometimes called “hindrances”— like doubting your meditative skill, other discursive thought, restlessness—always occur in meditation, even to very experienced practitioners. Experience gives you the capacity to work with these mental events, it doesn’t banish them. So, generally, the most helpful attitude is one of “allow, then reprioritize”: don’t get disturbed by the mental event, just notice it and shift back to the intention of meditation. But many novice meditators instead stiffen up, tightening too intensely around the intention to keep mental activity restricted, in a way that is counterproductive.

Helpful tricks:

• Internally affirm “everything is allowed, everything can be interesting.” Detours can be fun parts of the trip.

• Check to make sure you’re not enforcing overly harsh extensions of general principles. For example, notice whether you’re interpreting “try not to intentionally get caught up in thought” as “never have or get caught up in thoughts.” If you are, stop it.

• See if you can hold the mental intention to meditate a bit more loosely. To get a feel for loosening intention, imagine throwing a ball at a specific target, and then imagine loosely chucking it in a direction.

• For a few minutes, drop all control. Allow random distraction while loosely noticing it, as if you’re a voyeur dropping in on your thoughts and feelings. Try to enjoy the randomness, the unpredictable nature of interior life. Then return to a loosely held intention.

Guarding against emotional intensity

Often, people are taught to emotionally contain themselves at a young age, and the most robust way to contain yourself is to not allow yourself to feel too intensely. This is adaptive in development, but unnecessary for adults with good emotional regulation. And yet the habit to constrain your emotional experience often remains present in adult meditators. It adds tension and drains the color from meditation and life.

Helpful tricks:

• Just ask: could I let myself feel everything 10% more? If that worked, what about 20% more?

• Check whether there’s a perceived boundary between you and the emotion in your experience, a sense that there’s a spatial “partition” in the way of feeling. If so, see if you can earnestly adopt the intention to relax that boundary.

• If your experience feels “dull” or “boring” or “unemotional,” what does that feel like? What is the texture? If the experience isn’t peaceful, there is probably some subtle anger, sadness, or fear in it that will intensify if you tune in. (And in the context of meditation, that is a good thing, assuming you’re in your window of tolerance.)

Tracking time, tracking space

Space and time—by which I mean, the sense of where on earth you are, and what time it is—aren’t directly created by bare sense experience, they are inferences placed on top. When you look at a sunset and you are absorbed in it, no part of the experience unambiguously tells you “it’s 6:22 PM.” Temporarily relaxing the tracking of space and time can create incredible experiences in meditation. Reflect on how flow states are typically characterized by dropping these frames of reference: wouldn’t it be nice to gain the ability to temporarily drop the frame?

Helpful tricks:

• Ask: what mental sensations, specifically, tell me that I’m located in this place, or this time? Once you notice that the feelings of space and time are being created by a mental process of “marking” or “tracking” reality, the tracking often diminishes all by itself.

• Play with the question: “what if there is only one eternal moment?” Or: “what if everything in my life has happened within one space of awareness?” The intention is not to entertain these as philosophical or intellectual truths, but to use them as temporary lenses on experience.

• Ask yourself whether there is a quality of awareness that is ageless, a quality has been the same since you were a child. See if you can tune into this foundational quality. Remembering spacious, expansive-feeling moments from childhood may help as a reference.

Problem: The essence of the dharma is not grasping, and doing some other nicer stuff instead. You know, the noble truths that we keep talking about. But, in speaking about all the nuances therein, and building a religion, the teaching has gotten all tangled up.

Solution: Let’s make a tradition built around less theorizing, and more interfacing with a master who serves as an embodiment of the teaching. Just sit there and let go, and have the master trigger you when you’re missing the point.

New side effects: Some people need all the theorizing to understand what’s going on. Also, just sitting there and intermittently getting triggered is an abrasive style for many. So, a few students get traumatized, and a bunch of others don’t get it, and occasionally your teacher is just a lunatic.

We can also think this way about valuable modern wisdom teaching. Let’s take my understanding of Art of Accomplishment (hey AoA friends!).

Problem: Much of the beauty of the contemplative path is in working with emotion. But people use the contemplative path as another way to resist emotion, despite what everyone says in all the books—and for strivey people, holding in emotion is perhaps the most common form of grasping.

Solution: Let’s go for that juicy emotional release right away, and use that release to train people on what it feels like to unclench themselves, with the wonderful feedback loop of connection.

New side effects: Focusing on your emotions and connection can just become a new kind of grasping. Some people who might need better self-regulation skills become less functional as they over-focus on chasing catharsis.

Or Jhourney, an organization which I love, and happily collaborate with (hello Jhourney colleagues!).

Problem: People miss out on the life-changing effects of meditation because they don’t know that some helpful and beautiful states might be closer than they think, and they’ll maybe never undertake the experimentation required to hit them.

Solution: Let’s make a retreat that gives people agency to experiment in such a way that they hit an onramp to unbelievable pleasure and release, much faster than usual.

New side effects: There is no way to do this that won’t create, in some people, strivey button-mashing, reinforcing the attitude of “optimize myself harder.” Occasionally someone will hit an emotional sinkhole, and bliss practice will suddenly be therapy practice (productive, even amazing, but less fun).

Or, for more lightning round, Byron Katie’s work.

Problem: People get caught up with thoughts to try to make themselves happy, when, often, deconstructing thought is the most immediate path to mental freedom.

Solution: Here’s a powerful tool for creating mental fluidity, a rapid procedure for loosening the grip of painful identity beliefs.

New side effects: People get all caught up on the tool of debugging their reactive thinking, thus becoming more worried about thoughts, rather than understanding mental fluidity as a pointer towards a non-graspy way of relating to life.

I have fun criticizing different traditions and teachings from this standpoint, noticing all the ways they break down in implementation. However, for a long time, this criticism carried the assumption that someday, I’d come up with a better, pithier instruction set that would avoid these side effects.

And then I noticed that years after writing a passionate post called Deep Okayness, about the positive effects of working lovingly with all the difficult parts of your psychology, people still came up to me saying: “hey, how do I know I’ve reached real Deep Okayness? I keep feeling bad about myself because I haven’t done self-acceptance right.” Sometimes they assume I will personally disapprove of them for this, which makes me sad. I now have a Deep Understandingness of how any pointer you give someone can become fuel for more grasping.

More recently, I started to wonder: wait. What if I’m thinking about all of this the wrong way? What if this is the spiritual path?

Problem: Life. Seems bad? Feels bad? Some wise-seeming people say it’s actually good? What do.

The spiritual path: Open up, try to be kind, notice how wonderful the universe is, let this fill you with awe and humility, notice that there’s plenty of work to be done, especially on yourself. Here are a million practices and frameworks that might help.

Side effect: Whatever fucked up way you relate to the above instructions, or the teachers who convey them, or a cool spiritual experience you have, will cause you to become further ensnarled in your suffering.

Which is also the solution: Eventually you will be forced to stop doing whatever stupid shit the spiritual path caused you to do. Hopefully a kind teacher (formal or informal) will be there to point out the stupid shit. Someday, letting go will show itself, by the grace of God, and you will be transformed. Hopefully you can also remain honest about your flaws.

A vessel for transformation is an opportunity to come up against your foibles. They are the same thing.

Or: you come to God by struggling with God.

This has given me a sense of reality about what we’re all doing here. None of us can spread, reinterpret, or revamp these precious teachings in a way that avoids causing temporary damage. Temporary damage is the nature of the work—hopefully, damage that causes helpful adaptation, which is to say, wisdom. All we can do is be kind, be honest, be pragmatic, and try to exemplify wisdom ourselves in the way we relate to people, such that a crude attempt to copy us will result in the least harmful errors. An opportunity to refine this craft is there in every interaction.

If the wisdom is there, then people will feel better, on average, and move slightly closer to liberation as a result of having interacted with us. If we lose track of the wisdom, we will know it also by the direct effects of our mode of relating. None of us can know the ultimate benefit. That is a matter of faith.

I try to remember my favorite words of the Diamond Sutra. “In the realm of complete nirvana, I shall liberate all beings. And while I thus liberate beings, not a single being is liberated.” For me, this is a rich paradox with many implications. One is a pointer for how to be with people: the moment that I’m splitting the world into you, the un-free thing, and me, the thing trying to free you, I have already lost the plot. It is so easy to slip out of actual relation, back into a place of superiority or technique, and forget the nature of what we’re doing here.

May we all keep our heads out of our asses, and remember!