Since this is the first blog post about “Unlearning Meditation,” I would like to start with an alternate introduction to the book. This introduction was written before the one that appears in the book. There is nothing wrong with it – it just didn’t seem like the way I wanted to open the book. In some respects it says a bit more about the book than the introduction that was chosen, which is why I am posting it below:

Unlearning meditation is an exploration of what meditation is for anyone who meditates or has tried to meditate. It is a way to learn about one’s meditation practice so as to disentangle from the rigidity, forcefulness, and negative habits of that practice, and is not about getting rid of, dropping, or disavowing one’s meditation practice. For someone who has never meditated before, it is way to learn how to meditate in a flexible and open way, one that will stimulate interest in the meditative processes one is going through.

                Just as we go through a period of learning how to meditate, we can also go through a period of unlearning meditation. Along with some guidance on how to engage that process, this book also includes descriptions of people’s meditation sittings while going through it. By reading other people’s experiences, you may find you are not alone in this – that others have been through a period of unlearning the unwanted habits of their meditation practice and have come out the other end of the tunnel with a revived commitment to meditation and a greater interest in, and appreciation of, their inner worlds.

                This is no easy task, but neither is meditation. Meditation can require quite a bit of time and effort to get to a place where it becomes less effortful and more natural. The approach to meditation for those of you who are new to meditation is a simple and open, but it still requires some dedication to doing it in order for it to show how well it can work. I would suggest that while you read this book, you also meditate more frequently than usual, and use it as a meditation manual.

                Unlike your standard meditation manual, which generally contains a variety of meditation practices and instructions on how to do them correctly, this book contains a minimal amount of instruction. Its purpose is to create more awareness on how we do various meditation practices. So the orientation is not to give one instruction after another, but to elucidate a way to explore and understand how we have been doing meditation practices. It offers ways of seeing what is behind the instructions we do. And, not only that, but what is behind our particular ways of doing those instructions.

                Like a standard meditation manual, this book does go through the kinds of development that occur when doing this form of meditation. It provides a reference for those who are meditating in a more open, unstructured manner, supporting that kind of meditation practice in the only way I know how – by making the meditative process (what happens in meditation and how one relates to those experiences) the primary object of one’s meditation practice. It is a practice of becoming aware of the full range of experiences one has in meditation. To do that, one has to become aware of what one is doing as a meditation practice, for that too lies within the range of one’s experience, and greatly influences what happens in meditation.

Essentially, this is a book of learning meditation presented in an unorthodox manner.

This book is organized with both beginning and experienced meditators in mind. There are short sections that may be more relevant to one group than the other, but for the most part, this book intertwines the main themes of learning how to meditate and examining one’s existing meditation practice. The first part of the book touches upon many things that are further delved into in the second part. One could easily read the first part of the book, and then flip to the sections in the second part that are of immediate interest, without losing much in the way of comprehension.

The second part of the book begins with a pivotal chapter on the meditative process, where I go into some detail on my theory of six meditative processes. I first published this theory in the Insight Journal (Spring, 2005). In the intervening years I did very little work on this theory, and it was not until I began working on this book that some new pieces fit together. It is a work in progress, and I am just introducing it here as a broad conceptual framework for looking into the relationship of the mental processes we go through in meditation and the practices we do.

Lastly, I would like for you to know that disagreeing with what I have to say about meditation practice is part of this approach to meditation. Critical thought is often discouraged in meditation teachings, but not this one. If at some point this book gets your goat, that’s okay, you can keep reading, even though you might want to rip it to pieces. And, if you relate to it and love it in places, that’s okay too. Whatever comes up for you while reading it, you can always take it into your meditation sittings.