Things I Wish I'd Known About Meditation

I ain't no teacher, but I've learned a few things.

You do anything loudly enough for long enough, and eventually someone shows up asking questions. I’ve been talking about meditation and prayer for a long time, so I get questions.

Most folks seem to fall into three categories:

1: I can’t meditate, I don’t have time.

2: I’m having a hard time with a regular practice.

3: WTF is going on!? Am I crazy?

Quick Practices

(answers to “I can’t meditate, I don’t have time”)

As much as I’m a zealot for regular practice, a lot of folks I talk to are just trying to get through the day. Maybe they’ll feel drawn towards a regular habit-engrained practice someday, but right here, right now, what they need is just a little chill. A little narrative distance. A quick slap in the face and cold water bath from reality.

The challenge is that I don’t think one size fits all: I’m highly visual, you might be highly auditory. I’m a neurospicy epileptic, you might be a normie. But here are some things that feel like pretty universal “good tech.”

• Phillip Shephard’s “Elevator Shaft” meditation is very, very short, and takes you through a simple, powerful body-sensing and attention practice. Pop in a pair of earbuds, and wherever you are, sit up straight and you’ll feel better in 346 seconds.

• Cheaterpants 5 minute Kasina: Turn on your phone’s flashlight. Turn it all the way down. Hold it at arm’s length in your lap and stare at it. Count to 30 in your head while you try and see every detail of the light you can tease out. Now close your eyes. Explore the after image. Just note it. See what comes up. Can you keep your attention on it?

• Sleep. I know sometimes that’s actually the problem, but meditation instructor Michael Taft has your back. His 20-minute guided sleep meditations will, if nothing else, chill you out as he talks in your ear with his deep, beautiful voice.

• Almost Sleep with Yoga Nidra. Yoga Nidra is an old body-scanning practice with a few twists that use moving attention to trick your brain/body into letting go. There are a lot of terrible Yoga Nidra guided meditations on YouTube, but friends over at The Leading Edge turned me onto Ally Boothroyd, and hers all seem to be great. Lie down and pop this 20-minute starter on, and I suspect you’ll be pretty relaxed at the end.

• Walking Meditation (aka “Kinhin”). While here’s an excellent 45 minute discussion from Thich Nhat Hahn’s students on why he specifically used walking meditation to survive his Exile from Vietnam, the practice doesn’t need that much: simply stand up, and take one slow breath per step, and focus on the sensations in the soles of your feet. Inhale, foot lifts and movs. Exhale, foot presses to the ground. That’s it. You can do it in your kitchen for 10 breaths, or in the woods for 10,000.

• Noting for Dummies. “Noting” is a big-deal for meditation nerds, and old Burmese monk Mahasi Sayadow wrote a super influential treatise on the practice. But literally all it is is … noticing reality. Close your eyes and name everything in your experience. If you’re a breath follower, you can note: “breathing in. breathing out. Tickle in nose. Thinking. Pain in knee. Breathing in.” and so on. It sounds silly, but this “labelling” style of practice really works for many people. Eventually, your “noting” will be come too fast and granular for actual language labels, and you’ll start noticing, more than noting. This will feel silly. This will feel stupid. Maybe note “I am judging my noting” as a note!

• Christian? Try the Way of the Pilgrim! In J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, Franny gets hooked on saying a version of the Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, Have mercy on me, A sinner.” If the prayer also contains real semantic and metaphysical meaning for you, all the better (just like Om Mani Padme Hum can be simply sounds, or each syllable can have specific meaning.)
  
  But the real power is that like any Mantra, it takes on a life of its own in deep concentration. As Franny puts it:

“–you only have to just do it with your lips at first–then eventually what happens, the prayer becomes self-active. Something happens after a while. I don’t know what, but something happens, and the words get synchronized with the person’s heartbeats, and then you’re actually praying without ceasing.”

The Nuggets

(answers to “I’m having a hard time with a regular practice”)

Read Less

It’s very easy to over-intellectualize meditation and spirituality. For myself and I suspect a lot of people, the reading-talking-thinking-languagy part of my brain isn’t what needs any more exercise.

Put another way, I find it all too easy to replace actually being here and now with being in a book. I’ve spent hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of hours reading science, religion, meditation and spirituality text. While the frameworks are helpful and it’s fun knowing things and being well read makes for more interesting conversations, I don’t think most of those hours helped my actual practice as much as hours, you know, actually doing it.

I think this especially true in normal, high-stress day to day life. If I have 20 minutes to go into a room and shut the door, I know that those 20 minutes will be much, much better spent in silence with my eyes closed than they will be reading another section of the Gita, or some modern Tome-of-Woo. But reading is easier.

Make a “Bad” Habit

For a long time when I would pray or meditate, I was “content focused.” I was going to do a specific meditation. I was reciting a certain prayer. I was working through the Psalms. I was practicing a specific “thing.”

In retrospect, none of the content for the last 30 years or so has been as important as the showing up. Many times — many years — I had no real enthusiasm or even interest in “practice.” It simply become how I end my day. Sometime between “day” and “dinner” I would sit alone.

Sometimes, it’s an hour of me kneeling with a pad and pencil, thinking and making notes about something mundane. Sometimes it’s 20 minutes lost in self-recriminating ego-games and ancient schoolboy slights. Sometimes its 2 hours of pure light. It doesn’t matter. Showing up and doing it mattered. The trick is not to judge what happens past showing up. Showing up is the victory, whether the sit is “bad” or not.

Fix Your Hips

The folks at Zen Mountain Monastery have regular online sessions called “Nuts and Bolts” where a senior teacher gives very practical advice on sitting. Best advice ever? “fix your damned hips!”

Sitting in actual attentive stillness for 30 minutes or more at a time is not something a Western body is used to doing. We are a nation of slouching fidgeters. While some pain sitting can be instructive and focus the mind. That’s cool, and indeed, it can help get through a painful sit and even provide a great container for insights. But you know what’s also cool? NOT sitting for hours in pain.

If you’re new to practice, I beg of you: take your body’s signals seriously. Do the stretches, or the yoga or the Pilates, or whatever feels right to you so you can hold some erect sitting position for half an hour without pain. That might mean sitting in a chair for a year before moving to a cushion. But do the body work. It makes an enormous, enormous difference.

Make Space

While discomfort can be powerful (Anyone for a little Death Meditation?) most of the time I find it helpful to practice in a friendly and familiar container. Every meditation text has some version of this advice: set up your altar/shrine/space.

I used to take this very seriously, acquiring lots of … objects. I know lots of people for whom a well-curated and adorned devotional space is really important. Personally, as I start knocking on the door of my 7th decade on this rock, I’ve let more and more of the “things” go:

After years of slowly removing all the books and idols and incense and art and flowers and bowls and carpets and pillows and all that jazz, this is all that remains in my 10 x 10 temple-of-whatever, and every object has a reason.

• Cushion, Bench: While i’ve tried everything, this is all I really need to sit on.

• Window, Candle, Water, Timer: Fire Kasina or Trataka is my primary concentration practice, especially in winter. In summer, I often open the window and simply absorb the woods outside. The pomodoro timer lets me know whether I’m late or early for dinner and I like it better than having a clock.

• Sound: In the corners are speakers, which I use to play ambient music or binaural beats if there’s other noise in the house or outside for some reason (or to play guides or music.)

• Lighting: I’m very light sensitive, so adjustable, dim lights matter to me.

• Mirror: Depending on the modality, mirrors can be really interesting to work with, especially in certain non-dual and no-self practices.

• Body stuff: For me Yoga and Pilates right off the cushion are really valuable. Being set up to move right into body work helps me manage the excess {energy/kundalini/neurological discord/trapped trauma/anxiety/animal spirits/magical lightning/firetongues of holy spirit} stuff that arises in my sits more and more as I get older.

That’s it. This 10 by 10 foot room contains all of the luxury I really need in the world (the Pilates reformer being a particularly luxurious find, a hand-me-down from an instructor).

I’m not saying you, or anyone else, needs even this. My most {meaningful? important? lasting?} meditative experiences have all come in nature, not this room. But the familiarity and simplicity of a dedicated, sparse hermitage makes forming and keeping the habit easy.

Integrating Weirdness

(answers to “Am I Crazy?”)

Whether it’s Jhana Meditation or Psilocybin or the Holy Spirit, a “big experience” in practice can feel like finishing your favorite book for the first time. It can take a while to figure out how your relationship with the world is going to change. You can be left with a sense of “how do I go back to the real world knowing this exists?”

Perceptions shift. Personalities realign. Maybe you saw god. Maybe you felt kundalini energy run through your body. Maybe you saw machine elves or spoke to your inner snake spirit. You’ve been in the river. You’re wet now. You’re learning to swim.

I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits all answer to “integration” of non-ordinary states of consciousness any more than there is for meditating. But I have seen folks get themselves reoriented pretty well, and here’s a few thoughts.

Therapy

Look, I’m not a trained anything. And if you’ve genuinely broken some part of your way-of-being enough that your having a hard time functioning, take your mental health seriously. Talk to a professional.

Meditation isn’t a replacement for getting your own personal stuff figured out. Two weeks on retreat isn’t going to solve your relationship issues or heal your traumas. What it for sure will do is force you to pay attention to them, because if you’ve got that stuff riding inside, when you quiet all the noise, it’s gonna wanna get in the driver’s seat.

Spiritual Autolysis

This is a fancy phrase (courtesy of Jed McKenna) for a fairly simple practice. Sit down. Shut up. Ask yourself what’s true until you know by writing it down. Grab a piece of paper and write “I Believe…” at the top of it and keep going. For everything you write, steel-man all the counter arguments. You think the sky is blue?

Why? How do you know? Because you saw something with your eyes? Why do you believe what you see with your eyes? Keep going. Unmask all the untruths.

Put another way: journal. Write down the stuff you experience in meditation. Challenge it. Argue with yourself about it. It’s way better to spend 10 pages wrestling with “I believe I saw God and he actually spoke to me,” and all the ways that makes you react, feel, think and challenge than to simply carry it around in your head. Then… delete anything you cannot absolutely prove to your own satisfaction, and start over.

This “self-digestion” of belief is great for thinkboi wordnerds like me. I spent a year on this project in 2020, and it was surprisingly hard and utterly transformative.

Embracing Simple Gifts

Sit long enough, and you will be changed. Maybe you’re less reactive to emotional situations? Maybe you take longer to think about what you are going to say than you used to? Perhaps you can now pick out fine details in a painting you’ve walked past for years, or hear an entirely new part in a favorite piece of music.

While I have not personally developed obvious supernatural abilities, I have had all sorts of weird normal-adjacent things surface. Since I was in 3rd grade I’ve been color blind. After a particularly strong practice season, I discovered I could, if I dropped into a single-pointed concentration, ace the tests. I learned how to feel all SORTS of body signals I’ve never felt before. I’ve become an vastly better tracker in the woods.

You’re not crazy. It just happens. How well you perceive reality is a function of concentration and filtering. Both are massively and demonstrably trainable. And yet, almost nobody bothers.

The “Integration Economy”

If, however, the things your experiencing seem to cross into the wildly bizarre, well, that’s both amazing for you and also the window into a problematic realm of spiritual capitalism.

On the one hand, I’ve now had enough interactions with folks who I believe are genuinely gifted, wholehearted, smart, rational people who do all sorts of “woo” things to not just dismiss them all out of hand. On the other, there are a lot of charlatans out there looking to prey on spiritual seekers with promises of healing and secret knowledge.

This is, as Tom Morgan dubbed it, where the “Integration Economy,” and I have no better advice than that given in the above link from Tom, perhaps with a side-order of “A Path with Heart” by Jack Kornfield, and a general recommendation for Tara Springett if your finding yourself with a disturbingly energetic lighting-spine problem.

Letting it Go

In the Zen tradition, when you sit down to talk to the Abbot or a teacher and ask them about some weird stuff that happened, the most likely word you’ll hear is “Makyo,” a Japanese word that loosely translates to “Devil Realms.” The Zen take is that all of these weird things — from visions to levitation — are just mental-formation distractions from being in reality, here and now. Or if you want to science it up: its all just a transient hallucinatory state caused by our predictive processing brain-engine suffering from lower-than-normal stimulus.

Either way: letting it go … letting everything go … seems like it’s always the right answer.

Peace.