The recent five-day retreat at Cloud Mountain Retreat Center in the state of Washington was the first retreat I taught since the book came out. It was attended by about thirty people, many of whom were new to me. A good many of the participants already had a copy of “Unlearning Meditation” and were reading it during the retreat.

At first I wasn’t sure if I would talk about the book and teach from what is in it or just teach the retreat as I would normally. I began by talking about the material in the book, elaborating on some of the earlier chapters, just I have in this blog. Then I decided that what I needed to do was fill in the Dharma teachings that were only briefly touched upon in the book. A similar thing happened during the weekend retreat at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, which immediately followed the Cloud Mountain retreat. I will post segments of two talks given at these recent retreats following this blog entry.

I would like to say more about the area of “transformative conceptualization” as found in the book. This theory is actually quite simple, though it may seem intimidating at first encounter. It is a theory about how we conceptualize our inner experience, and is especially relevant for meditation practice. The theory goes like this: we tend to conceptualize our experience using single words to describe it and have no way to question these concepts except by developing more accurate (or honest) descriptions, which entails using phrases, sentences, metaphors, and similes.

A single-word description is a summing up of an experience that is used to link and associate a variety of intrinsically different yet superficially similar experiences. For example, if a person labels a thought about seeing a friend for dinner tomorrow as “planning,” and also uses that label for a train of thought about writing a paper for a class next week, then that person is only looking at one superficial detail (that of being about “the future”) of the thoughts and identifying them as the same on account of that detail. When looking into each of these thoughts however, one can see that the thought about seeing a friend for dinner tomorrow may also have had images of one’s friend and feelings for that friend, along with pieces of the history of the relationship; while the train of thought about writing a paper may have moments of focused attention on how to best articulate certain ideas, recollections of what one has read on the subject, an imagined dialog with the professor who will read the paper, and so on.

These more developed descriptions can then be used to question whether “planning” is a correct and useful conceptualization for these experiences. How does the single-word description affect us compared to the more detailed description?  The use of the label “planning” in the example above may make one feel like one is doing something wrong, or at the very least, unproductive, especially when these thoughts occur within a meditation sitting. The more detailed description doesn’t carry the judgment of doing something wrong within it; such a judgment would be an assessment after the fact, while with the label the judgment would be immediate in most instances. But that is not all. The single-word description usually tricks us into believing that we have a definite, correct view of the experience. It is a closed, final description. It is used to create fixed and lasting stories about one’s self and others. Such stories as “I do a lot of planning in my meditation sittings” are products of believing in these kind of labels. Once the labels have reached this stage of becoming “true narratives,” it is not so easy to unseat their authority.

This brings us to the third stage of the transformative conceptualization process: seeing into the narratives. This can only be done when, through recollection and investigation, we have arrived at an alternative narrative that is either more plausible or accurate. Thus the more detailed descriptions are needed in order to question the validity of the narratives that have been built upon the single-word descriptions. Thus seeing into narratives involves honestly looking at how these narratives got built and were given authority, while at the same time granting greater authority to one’s more detailed descriptions. This process transforms our way of conceptualizing such experiences.

The section on “transformative conceptualization” can be found on pages 95 to 104. You may also want to read the chapter on the Explorative process (161 to 172). 

Talk on views given at Barre Center for Buddhist Studies

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I have been giving talks and teaching workshops the past few days, and so have had little time to think about this week’s blog entry, which is one reason it is day late. One thing that comes up at every workshop I teach is the area of drifting off in meditation.

Meditating in an open, receptive manner will lead to relaxation and to periods of drifting, and occasionally to sleep itself. Part of the reason for this is that there is no energy created from doing a task in meditation. Since we are not busy bringing our attention back to the breath or any number of meditation techniques, once our thinking starts to die down, there is nothing much holding our attention, and nothing to do. Our mind doesn’t just get quiet, it drifts towards sleep.

In "Unlearning Meditation" I write about hypnagogic states and how they may function in meditation. That is what many go through when they are drifting towards sleep. But in meditation our intention is not to fall asleep—that is we don’t sit down to meditate with the idea of falling asleep in the meditation sitting—so we may just graze the surface of sleep for a while and enter into a hypnagogic state, one that lingers instead of just being part of the transition into sleep.  

I believe that these hypnagogic states can be used to develop tranquility in meditation, as I have seen it happen countless times with many students over the past two decades. At first, it is easy to think that you have fallen asleep when entering into one of these hypnagogic states, since there can be dream-like scenarios, unusual images, dots of light or a field of light, or fragmented thoughts and bizarre sentences. But these are not dreams. There is nothing to be learned from trying to interpret the images or thoughts, and trying to do so will often interrupt the development of such states. My suggestion is to let the images, lights, and thought fragments form and to trust that your awareness of them will wake you up just a little bit within the state. You may then find that doing this will prolong the hypnagogic state in such a way that you begin to wake up in it, and may then be able to direct your attention and have more coherent thoughts. In this way it can open up into a state of tranquility, one that may actually be quite calm, settled, and aware.

For more about this process of “drifting off and waking up” you can read chapters 13 through 16 in “Unlearning Meditation.” I would be happy to read of your experiences of drifting off and waking up in meditation, so please feel free to email at Jason@skillfulmeditation.org

I start off Chapter 1 with this proposition: “Meditation is about a tension between allowing your mind as it is and the meditation instructions you use.” This is a theme that crops up throughout the book. What I am saying is that meditation is about the struggle or cooperation of one’s mind with the meditation instructions. When there is a struggle in one’s meditation sittings, there is more tension between where your mind wants to go and what the instructions would have you do. When there is more cooperation between the two, the tension decreases. But there is usually some degree of tension within one’s meditation sittings when one is doing an instruction-centered practice. When one has developed a trustworthy unstructured meditation practice, where instructions do not have a role, this kind of tension also diminishes—it then becomes mostly apparent during periods when you try to control your experience or re-direct your attention.

I follow up on this theme with an additional proposition: “The tension between the instructions you use and your mind as it is in meditation leads to tightening or loosening around the instructions.” (page 12) In response to tension within one’s meditation sittings, one will either put more effort into doing the instructions or try to drop the instructions. This will lead to tightening or loosening around the instructions. What is changed in this situation is how one is holding the instructions, either tighter or looser, in an attempt to affect your mind as it is. It is still an instruction-oriented direction, because what can be changed is how you are holding the instructions, not your mind as it is. But the common notion is to think that you can change your mind’s behavior in meditation by applying the right instruction correctly. That is, we should be able to settle an active mind through applying the instruction correctly—that an active mind won’t settle down by allowing it to continue as it is. It is this notion that needs to be questioned.

“If you have been following the grand theme of the tension between the meditation instructions you use and your mind as it is, you will see that any instruction that asks you to concentrate on one part of your experience (the breath) and exclude other parts of your experience (thoughts) will set up an internal struggle when the two are in conflict (such as fighting off thoughts to stay with the breath).” (page 13) Meditation teachings have a way of dividing the mind, even when they propound an underlying unity. One could say that I have divided the mind by stating that there is a part of oneself that does the instructions and a part that is one’s thoughts, feelings, memories, and perceptions. That is because I am addressing an issue inherent in instruction-centered practices, which do divide the mind into parts. When meditation instructions move out of the center of one’s meditation practice, the tension decreases and vanishes for long periods of time, as does the sense that one should be in control of one’s inner experience. There is also less of a sense of a detached, stable observer (or witness), which is a concept that often gets embedded in meditation instructions. (This is a topic I would like to pursue at a later time.)

In reply to what I have said here, someone could say, “The tension between the meditation instructions you use and your mind as it is is a healthy tension when it is used to tame the mind and clear away negative thoughts and emotions.” That is the story created around formal meditation techniques, giving them greater credibility and inviting more faith than they deserve. Here the goal is used to justify the means. But not only that, the kind of force or aggression found in the application of the meditation instructions (often under the guise of “right effort” or “discipline”) cannot possibly create a “healthy” sort of tension. Gentleness in applying a meditation instruction can produce a healthy tension, one that keeps the meditator focused and alert, but also flexible, and thus willing to drop the instruction when it starts to lead to harsher intentions and more aggressive means. That is, when your attention refuses to rest on the breath after trying to gently get it to stay there, instead of forcing it there, you give up on trying to get your attention to stay on the breath and allow your be mind to be as it is (restless, agitated, bored, sleepy, or any other state of mind).

Later on in the book I go into what I call the “conflicted process.” This meditative process occurs whenever there is some kind of conflict within the meditation sitting. At first, while unlearning meditation, there will be the kind of conflict I have been describing above regarding the meditation instructions you have used. However, there are many other conflicts that arise in meditation that get obscured by the ongoing conflict between your mind as it is and the meditation instructions, and these conflicts are generally more pertinent to our lives. It is as though by trying to follow the meditation instructions correctly we lose sight of the serious kinds of inner tension and turmoil that have been with us—the meditation instructions actually distract us from them. But serious inner conflicts don’t vanish for good just because we have shifted our attention away from them by starting to do a formal meditation practice. Nor are these inner conflicts cleared up by deeply tranquil or highly aware meditative experiences. Such experiences can help, as you can see in the section on “Impasses and Calm Spaces,” but they do not adequately address or resolve these conflicts. For example, they will not fully assuage conflicts regarding religious or philosophical beliefs.

On July 14th, Dr. Melissa West of Contact Talk Radio interviewed me for her hour-long show that will air at 8am on July 28th at www.contacttalkradio.com.

Dr. Melissa West had read a pre-published version of the book and was greatly interested in having me on her show.  Her questions were very thoughtful and displayed an understanding of meditation from having a meditation practice of her own.

A good portion of the interview covered the areas of meditator’s guilt and the promise of a meditation practice, which were topics discussed at the recent teacher-training retreat held in Spokane, Washington.  Since I can’t talk about the radio interview as this point, I would like to introduce the discussion at the teacher-training retreat, where I was joined by Linda Modaro, Mary Webster, Nelly Kaufer, and Dan Nussbaum.

I will begin with a question from Nelly Kaufer.

Nelly: I found it interesting to contemplate this line (in the introduction to the book): “When you are interested in the dependently arisen inner world of your meditation sittings, meditator’s guilt has no hold or sway over you.” So I spent some time trying to put this together. If you are looking at the dependently arisen inner world, then things get pretty interesting…. So interest trumps guilt. Instead of feeling like I should be meditating, I am meditating because I’m interested. Is that basically what you are saying?

Jason: Yes. (When I wrote it) I had the sense of that passage referring to when there is a “doer” of the practice. Seeing the dependently arisen nature of your experience really starts to take away that doer, and therefore there is much less of that kind of activity (meditator’s guilt).

I came up with the term meditator’s guilt quite by accident nearly a decade ago, and have used it sparingly since. It came to me during a workshop when I asked each person to tell me about his or her meditation practice. Practically all of them said that they did not meditate every day, which was often followed by other disparaging remarks about their ability to meditate. Initially, this saddened me. Only later did I wake up to enormity of this problem with how meditation is being perceived as a disciplined activity, much like physical exercise (which interestingly enough produces a similar kind of guilt).

When doing any meditation practice, a “doer” of the meditation practice is created, even if that practice is about no-self or transcendence. This doer becomes a condition for feelings of guilt, incompetence, and failure that creep into the meditation practice. Instead of trying to get rid of a self that does the meditation practice, we can learn to see into it as dependently arisen.

For example, if I find myself discouraged by my mind wandering too much in my meditation sittings, I can look at my “discouragement” at my mind wandering, instead of trying to stop my mind from wandering. That discouragement has a self-structure to it—it has a particular tone of voice, a set vocabulary, a memory or two of prior experiences of the same sort, and perhaps other  elements that are on the edge of my awareness, but can be picked out over time as I stay with that experience while also allowing my mind to wander (if that is what continues to happen).

Meditator’s guilt may then appear in one’s meditation practice—for how could it not when one is trying to do a particular practice correctly (even this one!)—but it may have less credibility, and therefore less sway over one.  

In our discussion of this passage about “meditator’s guilt no longer having sway over you,” Dan Nussbaum remarked that this sounded like a promise. That is, if one meditates in this way, meditator’s guilt won’t arise or won’t be a problem anymore.

I replied that I have consistently seen people have meditator’s guilt intruding less into their practice, so that is a promise I can put forth. I went on to say that people can meditate for some time without such guilt, but when they hear a talk or read a book on meditation that stresses effort and discipline, then meditator’s guilt may once again enter into their meditation practice.

Later on in the discussion, Linda Modaro returned to this idea of the promise, and we drew connections between meditator’s guilt and the epilogue of the book, where I describe what this practice may look like after doing it for a period of time.

Linda: I like that you thought about whether you can make that promise. You have seen it enough that you can actually state that. That ties in with the epilogue… However they go through this approach, and by staying with their experience, they will come to their own conclusions and understandings, and that they can come to depend on that. The author is promising that will happen… It is onward leading. 

Jason: Though it is not presented as a goal. It is presented as part of the whole process of meditating in this way. 

The kind of promise that is found in giving someone a goal in meditation and telling him that only this meditation practice done correctly will lead to that goal is a different kind of promise than saying that through the process of unlearning meditation you may notice a lessening of meditator’s guilt. The first kind of promise will keep one in a particular meditation practice for a long time, with the goal serving as the main reason for continuing that practice. On pages 33 and 34, under a sub-chapter titled “Dropping a Meditation Practice That Doesn’t Work,” I illustrate this first kind of promise:

"Often when meditation instructions are given, they are given with the promise that if done correctly, you will experience a certain result. Some people are promised enlightenment, partial awakening, relief from stress or pain, greater concentration, happiness, bliss, peace of mind, an overall sense of well-being and accomplishment if they persist with the instruction and do it faithfully, ardently, consistently, and above all, correctly, as it is taught by the teacher or the lineage of teachers within a tradition.

This puts some meditators into a serious bind. Even though they may be having difficulty doing the instruction, if they stop doing it, they feel they won’t realize the promise of the practice. They will have failed. The daily failures of not being able to do the meditation practice will pale in comparison with the monumental failure of never getting the promised outcome. Besides, everyone has heard stories of someone meditating for years and years in a certain way with no success, and then one day he gets it. All the struggle, turmoil, and pain has been of use. So it is quite common to think, “That can happen to me if I stick with this meditation practice long enough.”

This passage illustrates what it is like when there is a goal to be reached rather than a subtle change in one’s attitude that one may notice.

I am promising that a subtle change in attitude regarding meditation will occur, such as having less guilt concerning one’s performance or skill as a meditator. And I can make that promise because I have heard many people tell me just that, without my ever having said it will happen. So now I am saying it. I’m not promising the reader a meditative attainment or realization; this is much more down-to-earth. One will just be able to meditate in a looser, more open way, and feel less guilt about it.

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.