Meditation: It's Not What You Think

 

Meditation: It's Not What You Think

 

 

Excerpted from Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness

By Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D.

 

 

It might be good to clarify a few common misunderstandings about meditation right off the bat.  First, meditation is best thought of as a way of being, rather than a technique or a collection of techniques.

I'll say it again.

Mediation is a way of being, not a technique. 

 

This doesn't mean that there aren't methods and techniques associated with meditation practice.

There are.  In fact, there are hundreds of them, and we will be making good use of some of them.  But without understanding that all techniques are orienting vehicles pointing at ways of being, ways of being in relationship to the present moment and to one's own mind and one's own experience, we can easily get lost in techniques and in our misguided but entirely understandable attempts to use them to get somewhere else and experience some special result or state that we think is the goal of it all...

 

Second, meditation is not relaxation spelled differently.  Perhaps I should say that again as well: Meditation is not relaxation spelled differently.  That doesn't mean that meditation is not frequently accompanied by profound states of relaxation and by deep feelings of wellbeing.  Of course it is, or can be, sometimes.  But mindfulness meditation is the embrace of any and all mind states in awareness, without preferring one to another.  From the point of view of mindfulness practice, pain or anguish, or for that matter boredom or impatience or frustration or anxiety or tension in the body are all equally valid objects of our attention if we find them arising in the present moment, each a rich opportunity for insight and learning, and potentially, for liberation, rather than signs that or meditation practice is not "succeeding" because we are not feeling relaxed or experience bliss in some moment.

 

We might say that meditation is really a way of being appropriate to the circumstances one finds oneself in, in any and every moment.  If we are caught up in the preoccupations of our own mind, in that moment we cannot be present in an appropriate way or perhaps at all.  We will bring an agenda of some kind to whatever we say or do or think, even if we don't know it...

 

For meditation, and especially mindfulness meditation, is not the throwing of a switch and catapulting yourself anywhere, not is it entertaining certain thoughts and getting rid of others.  Nor is it making your mind blank or willing yourself to be peaceful or relaxed.  It is really an inward gesture that inclines the heart and mind (seen as one seamless whole) toward a full-spectrum awareness of the present moment just as it is, accepting whatever is happening simply because it is already happening...

 

Meditation is not about trying to get anywhere else.  It is about allowing yourself to be exactly where you are and as you are, and for the world to be exactly as it is in this moment as well.  This is not so easy, since there is always something that we can rightly find fault with if we stay inside our thinking.  And so there tends to be great resistance on the part of the mind and body to settle into things just as they are, even for a moment.  That resistance to what is may be even more compounded if we are meditating because we hope that by doing so, we can effect change, make things different, improve our own lives, and contribute to improving the lot of the world...

 

So, from the point of view of awareness, any state of mind is a meditative state.  Anger or sadness is just as interesting and useful and valid to look into as enthusiasm or delight, and far more valuable than a blank mind, a mind that is insensate, out of touch.  Anger, fear, terror, sadness, resentment, impatience, enthusiasm, delight, confusion, disgust, contempt, envy, rage, lust, even dullness, doubt, and torpor, in fact all mind states and body states are occasions to know ourselves better if we can stop, look, and listing, in other words, if we can come to our senses and be intimate with what present itself in awareness in any and every moment.  The astonishing thing, so counterintuitive, is that nothing else needs to happen.  We can give up trying to make something special occur.  In letting go of wanting something special to occur, maybe we can realize that something very special is already occurring, and is always occurring, namely life emerging in each moment as awareness itself.