How I Made Meditation Better For Me (22/30)
I'm writing 30 posts in 30 days, this is number 22.
Yesterday, I posted about how meditation had been, at one point, damaging to my mental health. Without really going into it, I also mentioned that I now have a healthier relationship to it.
I thought I'd elaborate on that today, by talking about what I’m now doing differently.
I stopped caring about enlightenment
Previously, I was very interested in chasing satori, enlightenment, persistent non-dual experience, or whatever you want to call it. The "stuff looks very different now" kind of enlightenment. This attitude was partially borne out of a juvenile desire to climb the biggest mountain, to tackle the biggest challenge. But also, I had some illusion that enlightenment would turn me into a flawless shiny superhuman.
And then I found out that enlightened people—or, at least, enlightened by the above definition—do all sorts of regular-human bad stuff, like perpetrate sex scandals and start flame-wars in comment sections. Moreover, I realized that I'm doing decently enough at my own life without some sort of bottom-up mental reorganization. A fundamental cognitive shift could be interesting, but I'm enough as-is.
This changed the whole vibe around meditation for me. Now, I'm not as insistent about plunging headfirst into the weirdest dimensions of perception. I just want to sort of splash around in my own consciousness and see what's up, in a gentle, non-confrontational fashion. If that leads to profound new vistas of mental activity, cool. If it doesn't, also cool.
I made relaxation a priority
In Daniel Ingram's book, he expresses despair that many people are doing things that look like meditation that make them feel nice and relaxed, but don't accelerate the acquisition of fundamental insights into the nature of reality. With respect to Mr. Ingram, my question is, why is that bad?
I got back into meditation when my wife did, through Transcendental Meditation. TM is already a pretty casual technique by design, but I pursued a much lower-effort version of it, which I called Transcendental Napping. My mantra was an English word picked at random. Sometimes I forgot to recite it. Sometimes I fell asleep, hence the name.
You can tell me it's not meditation. I don't care. It had tremendous benefits.
Relaxation itself can be profound. Relaxation leads naturally to effortless awareness. It improves social skills. It does all kinds of good things. Deep relaxation has even slightly improved the quality of my voice and physical bearing; it turns out that I was carrying around a lot of face/neck/vocal tension I was unaware of. I had never fully relaxed my vocal cords for an extended period of time. (There's relaxing, and then there's relaxing.)
I've expanded a little since inventing Transcendental Napping. Not all of my contemplative practice is relaxation-focused. But a fair chunk of it is, and I'm better for it in measurable and non-measurable ways.
I broadened my ideas of what contemplation is
As I observe other people, I notice that most of the interesting people I meet have some sort of contemplative practice that brings them closer to the sacred, or the texture of the Isness. And, importantly, I also notice that much of it doesn't look like Buddhist meditation, and it’s often informal.
Sometimes it's prayer, or just reflective time to oneself. Sometimes it's deeply engaged music-free physical activity. Sometimes it's detailed, focused attention on other humans, the kind of attentiveness that a sommelier brings to a glass of wine. The people who do these things certainly seem perceptive and self-possessed, or at least not less so than hardcore meditators I've met.
Accordingly, I've tried to attempt to bring some sort of contemplative awareness into more and more areas of my life, in a playful, experimental way. This post was sort of a joke, but sort of not.
I have an armchair hypothesis to advance about this. Part of the stated reason for deep meditation is to promote awareness such that it extends to all the little things you do in life. I've experienced this myself and it's potent and real. But maybe you can just extend awareness to diverse areas in your life by... doing that directly, rather than breaking your brain in an interesting way by staring at the back of your eyelids for three hours a day?
I aligned it with my priorities
I don't believe that life is suffering. I don't think my normal cravings are deeply unhealthy, or that I'm lost in a fundamental delusion about the nature of reality. And I don’t think that the fact that the self is a mental construct (in some of its dimensions) means that there’s “no self.” (Fight me.)
What I believe is that I'm basically here to love my family and friends, perceive and enjoy the gift of life, make good art, and be of service to others in whatever way I can. This entails a simple way of evaluating contemplative practices. Do they bring my mind into alignment with my priorities? If so, do. If not, regard as curiosity, to be delicately handled as a plaything if I feel so inclined, like any other drug experience.
That sounds obvious, and, well, I guess it is. But, frequently, I think people come to meditation by being told that their priorities/values/mindsets are totally screwed up and wrong and they should tear it all down by meditating their way out. Meditation is pitched as a total overhaul. That's how it was pitched to me, and I bought the pitch.
Now, I see it differently: I am a little off-kilter, in some ways that can be adjusted. Meditation is interesting, and can make me a little better, some of the time, if approached with caution and good spirits. That's enough of an endorsement for me.
"When you are beyond caring whether you’re awake or not awake, you’re free." - Genpo Roshi