The style of meditation I most often recommend is called noting. The technique of noting style meditation is to notice what you are aware of, and to label it with a simple "note" such as "seeing", "hearing", or "feeling". By doing this at a steady, frequent pace, about once every second or so, it forces you to be continuously aware and present. As you practice, it requires you to be mindful, because each moment you must prove that you are mindful by naming what you are uniquely aware of in that moment.
Noting could be seen as a more powerful form of mantra, in this case a dynamic or adaptable mantra. Rather than repeating the exact same word or phrase, each moment we must come up with a unique description of what is more or less predominate in our awareness at any time.
This practice is one of the more effective at interrupting the mind's natural inclination to go off and think about the next thing.
Some may be put off by the structure of it, or the verbal nature of it. My advice is to train the mind with high quality practice by whatever means you can. If that's noting practice, fine. If you can just sit without any technique, and by pure natural talent and willpower you can be present and aware during 95% or more of your formal meditation practice, then maybe do that. I list many techiques for this kind of mental skill training in Basic Meditation Styles, find what works for you.
But I would definitely look for something that gets the quality high. Quality in the sense of a high percentage of time aware and present. My belief is that getting the practice very pure, at least for a few important developmental years, may be pretty useful on the path, not that you should be hard on yourself for any lapses. As my guitar teacher pointed out, practice makes permanent. If your mindfulness practice is extremely sloppy, and you're spacing out left and right, to some degree that is indeed the mind that you will make permanent.
For some, it may even be that the very effectiveness of noting technique ends up putting them off. Noting can be very good at getting in the way of our natural conditioned desire to think, and the mind can find that frustrating, while at the same time being a new and difficult task. The underlying neurology wants to think, to daydream, to fantasize. It doesn't want to go on the equivalent of a thought "diet", and as a result many consciously or unconsciously prefer half measures.
People often seem to feel that they should just be able to "wing it" without technique. They drop the technique and end up doing a lot more of all that daydreaming that their underlying neurology wants to do.
My recommendation is to just have some reasonable awareness of how you are doing on your percent awareness meter, the percentage of time you are actually present and aware in practice, and be careful not to trade short term desire or inertia for long term peace and tranquility.
Regarding thought, there's a fine line in that we don't really want to create aversion to thought. One of the basic themes that comes out of the contemplative path is that everything is okay just as it is. That's true, and we can bring something of that into every moment, but the problem is that we have spent perhaps a hundred thousand hours overemphasizing thought and our identification with it, and it will take some attention to remedy that.
One piece of practical advice is, for perhaps a few years, lean a bit more into bodily sensations. If you can let go of thought a bit, and can pay a little more attention to what is going on in the body, you are restoring a kind of natural balance. We have unconsciously prejudiced ourselves towards thought, and we're not going to be able to immediately let go of that. We need to pay more attention to the body, kind of an affirmative action for the sensate world. There is nothing necessarily wrong with thought, but we are essentially prejudiced bigots with respect to it, so affirmative action is required.
Advocating a relatively hardcore kind of effort can lead to problems for some people. They may become overly concerned about practicing correctly. "Am I doing it right?" or "Oh no, I've spaced out again!" The way to practice is to learn the simple basics and then be nonjudgmental about the results. If you're practicing in the direction of being continuously aware, relaxed, open, and non-conceptual, you are practicing correctly. If you space out, that is very much to be expected, particularly at first. More about that later, but the basic advice is don't beat yourself up about it.
It's also worth mentioning that the more effective a practice is, the more likely it is that someone will eventually stumble across some buried psychological problems. In the same exact way that enough psychotherapy or experimentation with psychedelic drugs will likely bring your psychological issues to the forefront, so will intense meditation practice. Sitting around daydreaming, not so much. But this is the path, to learn to become okay with all the parts of ourselves. As layers are peeled back, sometimes it will be tender underneath. You have to acknowledge and surrender to that tenderness, that pain, until you are okay with that newly uncovered layer, and then you continue and perhaps begin to peel off yet another layer.
Again, you're up against maybe a hundred thousand hours of practicing grasping at thought. When you do drift away and come back, understand how natural that is, and understand it is a good thing you came back to the present. This is what we want - to come back to here and now, so be pleased with the coming back part, and just go right back into your practice, your technique, and maybe this time with a little bit of extra energy or intent. Back to it, back to it, again and again and again. You keep putting the puppy on the newspaper, and eventually it learns.
Next: First Stage - Basic Noting
Table of Contents for How to Meditate
No comments:
Post a Comment