How To Get Into Meditation

tl;dr Don’t meditate because I do. Join the Evolving Ground community. Better not to read this article. If you read it, better to finish it.

Once in a while, friends who know that I have a regular meditation practice ask me how to get into it, and I want a doc I can give out without leading people astray.

First off, I’m always curious what people think meditation is. Over time, I’ve become less and less sure what is the difference between meditation and not-meditation — at least in a way that is unified across different traditions. It’s not sitting still, as walking meditation is an important part of Zazen practice. Is it clearing the mind? Many meditations instead fill the mind with a mantra or the breath or a flickering flame. Is it controlling the mind to do something? Shikantaza says otherwise.

As far as I can tell, the thing that unifies “meditation” across different traditions is “recognition of awareness of the present moment”. The recognition part is important because of course, we’re generally aware on some level of what’s going on because we need to operate in the world. But we don’t always know it. Under this operative definition, meditation is a total fugazi and you can even say that an athlete who’s in the zone is meditating. You can just go about your day exactly as you would normally and call it meditation. No one would be able to contradict you by empirical observation.

So at this point, it seems like there’s no such thing as meditation and therefore nothing to get into. The highest teaching of Tibetan Buddhism, Dzogchen, is sympathetic to this hopelessness. Keith Dowman, a Western teacher of Dzogchen, states it as “The true meditation is non-meditation”. As a matter of Dzogchen orthodoxy, we are all already enlightened based on our primordial nature.

But there must be some underlying desire that someone projected onto their flawed concept of meditation. Many people want to be happier or more free or more in control.

Even if we don’t know what meditation is, we can look at what different traditions have attached that label to and see if those traditions get the results you want. Of course, we have to pick one. If the would-be meditator already had one picked, we wouldn’t have had the confusion in the first place because we can just follow that traditions instructions for how to get into what that tradition calls meditation.

Since the question didn’t come with a suggested tradition, an unaffiliated amateur advice-giver like myself should probably follow the iatrogenic principle: first, do no harm. This is pretty hard. For one, society has changed greatly over the history of contemplative practice. It would be remarkable if we got mileage out of techniques from monks raised since young in a monastery in another country (with texts from an another poorly translated language!). The epistemology of spiritual practice is extremely poor and varied, and there isn’t yet a common scientific ground from which to investigate meditation. Worse yet, there have been some studies from ie Cheetah House that show that some practitioners can have severe adverse psychological reactions to meditation!

So, I can’t in good conscience recommend any practice that calls itself meditation because we either don’t know or it might very well be harmful. You might as well wait until science brings you a meditation helmet you can buy OTC at CVS. Clever researchers are making great strides as we speak.

Besides, is meditation really the only way to make improvements in our lives? Who among us can honestly say that everything else is perfectly dialed in. Why not try to get more sleep or work out more? And while you’re doing it you can try to observe what happens very closely. What excuses does the mind invent and how does it feel in the body? Do you have fixed patterns that your behavior sort of habitually falls into? Are those patterns helpful to you?

This sort of work is extremely tedious and painful. It is tempting to think that radical personal transformation could come from simply sitting still for a bit each day, like brushing one’s teeth. That seems much more comfortable and easy. But you’re going to have to face your demons one way or another and in my experience any meditation technique that avoids this is going to stop working at some point. The ego is extremely powerful and most meditation traditions aim to weaken the ego greatly if not deal it a fatal wound. There are many many tricks and ploys your ego will employ to maintain you in a state of illusion if you meditate every day without taking a hard look at your life.

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a controversial but brilliant Buddhist luminary, suggested “Better not to start, but if you start, better to finish”. So my advice is not to start meditating.

Of course, there are dangerous things that are nevertheless beneficial. The list of side effects on the average pharamaceutical commercial come to mind. The best way to balance those risks is, in my view, to find a flesh and blood teacher. The Longchen Nyingthig tradition suggests that you need three things to successfully transmit the Buddhist teachings: an awakened master, a lineage with a blessing, and faith. Whenever a friend asks me about meditation, we’re starting out really in the hole. I’m not an awakened master. There’s no lineage. Instead of faith there is actually absolute, radical doubt.

The way people learn anything else these days is to look up a bunch of stuff online and let it percolate in their heads. This is a pretty bad idea when it comes to spiritual practice because it is experiental — not intellectual knowledge that should be memorized. Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche said it better than I ever could.

In Tibet, new leather skins are put in the sun and rubbed with butter to make them softer. The beginning practitioner is like the new skin, tough and hard with narrow views and conceptual rigidity. The teaching (dharma) is like the butter, rubbed in through practice, and the sun is like direct experience. When both are applied, the practitioner becomes soft and flexible. But butter is also stored in leather bags. When butter is left in a bag for some years, the leather of the bag becomes hard as wood, and no amount of new butter can soften it. Someone who spends many years studying the teachings, intellectualizing a great deal with little experience of practice, is like that hardened leather. The teachings can soften the hard skin of ignorance and conditioning, but when they are stored in the intellect and not rubbed into the practitioner with practice and warmed with direct experience, that person may become rigid and hard in their intellectual understanding. We must be careful not to store up the teachings as only conceptual understanding lest that understanding become a block to wisdom. The teachings are not ideas to be collected but a path to be followed.

Excerpt From The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche

So don’t go look up any of the references I’ve made. Go find a flesh and blood human who is braver than me and willing to take a risk by wholeheartedly recommending their own spiritual practice to you.

The traditional guru model is fraught with potential for abuse, so I’m not saying you should take all your money to India. It should be someone you can connect with in a very ordinary way. Any kind of radical change requires accountability because it is very uncomfortable and easy to give up. The ego is also playing lots of tricks so it’s useful to have a second point of view to see through them. I don’t actually know how to pick them but if you want a good place to start playing with this, you can join the Evolving Ground community. They’ve structured it to minimize the accountability pitfalls of a traditional hierarchical Buddhist lineage. When navigating what you see, remember the points above!