how not to meditate
an inventory of things I tried that didn't work
Greetings earthlings 👽,
Last time I wrote to you, I shared my experience of trying to meditate (and mostly failing) for ten years.
I had a quick followup ready to hit send on. It detailed what I did to finally cultivate a stable daily practice.
But a couple things happened shortly before I sent you that followup:
On a whim, I shared my post on Hacker News and then took a nap. When I woke up, it was on the front page and had stoked a long discussion thread. Mama mia!
My wife gave birth to our beautiful, smiley, opinionated daughter. Finding long stretches of time to sit on the cushion grew increasingly difficult. Mama Misha!
As the dust settled from these two events, I re-read the post I was about to publish, and it just felt too tidy:
Via diaper changes, evening fussiness, and sleepless nights, the universe basically took my smug faux-rational “How to Develop a Meditation Practice That Sticks” post and shoved it up my ass.
As my own routines got flipped upside down, the everpresent stream of “How to Do XYZ” continued to flow through the pipes of LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Substack, and NYTimes Bestseller Lists.
I munched on their juicy morsels in between infant meltdowns, the dopamine centers of my brain lighting up with insights about productivity, parenthood, and career.
For all the “5 Evidence-Based Steps to Something or Another” posts that I collected, none of my reading translated to significant transformation or progress. But it sure felt good to read them.
And it got me thinking…
Why is the hard-fought compressed wisdom of other people interesting but usually unhelpful?
And from a producer’s standpoint… Is most of what we write just audience-building clickbait? Self-soothing assertions to prove to ourselves that we know something important?
What does it take to actually create something that sows seeds of transformation? Is the structure of such work different from essays like this one?
My conclusion to all of this is “I don’t know.” But I started wondering what types of writing (and learning) actually do stoke transformative experiences.
What Not to Do
Upon reflection on my own life, one type stuck out: Stories of what not to do.
These lessons aren’t as important as the extremely rich, vivid, and relatable experiences that accompany them. They represent hardgainz progress that practitioners have experienced on their own journeys.
Examples:
From Bojack Horseman — Don’t get stuck at a haphazard, hedonistic station for too long, because before you know it, the 20-year-old youthful You in the mirror will become an unrecognizable, tired, bitter 50-year-old You.
From Oz’s Cutting through to what matters — Don’t chase trends because you’ll never get to know or appreciate any single thing with depth or endurance.
Oftentimes, progress comes from seeing what you previously couldn’t see at all. You did things one way for long enough to crash and burn out. When everything failed, you finally decided to open your eyes to different details. That’s what these Stories of Don’t whisper — to look where it might not initially make sense to look.
Embedded in these stories are narratives about life, purpose, and mindset. So it’s still up to us to take what resonates and ignore what doesn’t. But we’ve now exited the realm of the detached, neat and tidy abstract. We’re getting into the mud, the slime of everyday life, where we risk the tuts and tsks of keyboard warriors and shitposters.
Cedric Chin came up with a different way to put some of this that I really like. I’ve found his framing to be a super useful way to extract Stories of Don’t:
“What would a novice get wrong here?”
Check out his full thread. Really good stuff.
How Not To Meditate
I began to take inventory of approaches to sitting that did not work for me. What wall was I running into that made me not want to show up? What if I didn’t do that thing that I always did in that one way?
I re-examined meditation instructions for stories of what not to do. I sought advice from people who had been at it for much longer than I have. And I practiced not doing those things.
Something cool began to happen at that point — As I revisited old texts, I started noticing the authors whispering some of these same lessons. These whispers has always been there! I had just been too eager to find juicy morsels to notice what laid in plain sight.
Within a few weeks, my practice began to subtly change. I felt my body open up … posture changes, hips loosening, shoulders dropping, ancient emotions and sensations surfacing, a wider awareness and sincerity that lingered off the cushion.
Showing up was still hard, but my mindset around it slowly morphed. I am becoming more experimental, more curious to see what will unfold.
Inverting the problem of meditating has had strong early success. So I wrote my Don’ts as bullet points. I’m very unsure how helpful this is to anyone because it’s still early days of putting it into practice. But I think it’s a step in the right direction:
Don’t clear your mind.
Don’t focus on “The Breath” as an idea.
Don’t try to meditate the right way.
Don’t take discomfort as a sign that it’s not working.
Don’t take discomfort as a sign that it is working.
Don’t close your eyes.
Don’t focus your eyes.
Don’t zone out into bliss.
Don’t meditate with your “left hemisphere brain”.
Don’t obsess over increasing the duration of each sit.
Don’t gamify your meditation.
Don’t try to recreate an old sit that went well.
Example: “Don’t clear your mind.”
Early on in my meditation journey, I sought to enter a state of not thinking thoughts at all. Isn’t that how meditation works?
Cleaaaaaar your mind hummmmm …
I wonder what I should eat for lunch, oh shit, hummmmmm …
Why is New York so loud? I should move to Miami, it’s probably not like this there, but if I move there then I’m just another tech bro doing tech bro things, plus it’s hot and they have hurricanes and hummmmmmm …
Every time thoughts appeared, I’d try to shut them down. The harder I tried shutting them down, the more I struggled. The more I struggled, the less likely I was to sit to meditate.
It turns out that it is practically impossible to try to cease all thoughts. There’s a great preliminary exercise in the Aro gTér lineage that explores just this:
“Whatever thoughts arise, block them. Cut them off immediately. Whatever thoughts are in your mind, force them out. Remain without thought. Continue to remain without thought.
[…] A valuable lesson has been learned. What do you think it is?”
Clearing my mind was a fool’s errand. So rather than clear my mind, I decided to let my mind be and see what happens, and happens next, and happens next after that.
As the thoughts continually appeared, and I got more agitated by them, I noticed another brewing Don’t to add to the list:
Don’t take discomfort as a sign that it’s not working.
Awareness of the bottomless cauldron of thoughts created a deep sense of anguish. Habitually, I try to cut out anything that causes me discomfort. But by suppressing, I kept the cycle of anguish churning within my mind.
So the next “game” I played was to actively seek out discomfort. Meditation became an Olympics of pain and misery: Sit until you’re in excruciating emotional anguish. Another Don’t brewed…
Don’t take discomfort as a sign that it is working.
And so on and so forth with more Don’ts brewing, more aha’s gleaned from texts, peers, and teachers.
These types of insights are intellectually obvious. But until I really noticed them for myself, I was bound to repeatedly hit the same walls. Once I did notice them, I began noticing that meditation masters had been pointing to them all along:
We played the last card and here we are, having lost again. We see that playing on and on is not going to solve our basic problem of feeling on some level always at odds with ourself, our life, our world; that whatever “it” is, it is not working. And somehow, at least some have the intelligence, the honesty, the integrity—and the grit—not to push this critical realization away. Somehow they find the bravery to stick it out and see what comes next.
The Practice of Pure Awareness, Reginald Ray
Helpful? Unhelpful? I’m figuring it out as well. Let me know your thoughts and suggestions!
Ammar
"Upon reflection on my own life, one type stuck out: Stories of what not to do.
These lessons aren’t as important as the extremely rich, vivid, and relatable experiences that accompany them. They represent hardgainz progress that practitioners have experienced on their own journeys.
...
Embedded in these stories are narratives about life, purpose, and mindset. So it’s still up to us to take what resonates and ignore what doesn’t. But we’ve now exited the realm of the detached, neat and tidy abstract. We’re getting into the mud, the slime of everyday life, where we risk the tuts and tsks of keyboard warriors and shitposters."
Resonates so hard. Neti, Neti.
Love it!! 🏄♂️🧘