Five Common Misconceptions about Meditation
I’ve been a meditation instructor for about two years now. During that time, I’ve noticed some cruel hoaxes being perpetrated on would-be meditators, making meditation seem much more complicated than it really is. Although it’s not easy, it is actually a simple technique. (Click here for instruction.) It’s so simple that it’s easy to miss its profundity.
Here are the 5 most common misconceptions I hear:
1. Meditation means you have to stop thinking.
This is simply not possible. Your mind cannot stop producing thoughts; that is what it does. Attempting to stop thinking would be like opening your eyes and telling them not to see. Quite frustrating, not to mention unachievable.
Instead, meditation is about making a different relationship to your thoughts. Rather than becoming embroiled in them, allowing the bad ones to make you feel bad and the good ones to make you feel good, you step back, notice them as they flow by, and feel the accompanying feelings (or lack thereof) fully. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a trickle or torrential. Just as you can observe a gentle drizzle or a wild hurricane from a distance, so you can also observe your thoughts and emotions.
2. The object of meditation is to create peace of mind and I can’t meditate because I just can’t calm my mind down.
Not so. Sometimes when you sit, your mind becomes peaceful and that’s great. Other times however, you just sit there the whole time working with a speedy jumble of thoughts that never stop coming. Either one is okay. The only thing that makes meditation hard is when you try to fight what your mind is doing. If you allow it, if you allow the peace, allow the turmoil, allow the boredom, your mind is much more likely to settle down than if you try to tell it how to act. And even if it doesn’t, the simple effort to work with your mind rather than allow it to run away with you creates positive effects.
One of the great things about meditation is you don’t have to pretend to be a blissed out calm person. You can be as frantic, silly, brilliant, equanimous and/or confused as you actually are.
3. If I’m not having special experiences (profound emotional catharses, energy up the spine, glimpses into the nature of reality, levitation to another planet), there’s something wrong with the meditation practice and/or I’m just not doing it right.
There is nothing more ordinary than the practice of sitting meditation. I mean, you’re sitting there. You’re breathing. You’re observing your mind as it is, as it would be even if you weren’t meditating. Rather than seeking to cultivate experiences (or just hoping some would happen to counteract the boredom), the practice is to hang out with yourself just as you are. Unconditionally. It is such a relief to take a break from the search for entertainment and distraction. Actually, when you start to get bored, that’s probably the best indicator that the practice is really starting to become beneficial.
4. I find meditation too hard, so instead I do walking/running/listening to music/yoga as my meditation practice.
Although many activities can have a pacifying affect on your nervous system such as taking a walk or listening to Bach’s Unaccompanied Cello Suites, these are not meditation. They are meditative. Any endeavor that unifies body and mind such as swimming, doing yoga, knitting—anything you do that, if you take your mind off of it, you mess it up—is profoundly soothing. We love these things. However, as mentioned, the idea behind meditation isn’t to calm down. It’s to wake up. Turn around. Look yourself right in the eye and discover who you really are.
5. I’ve learned various kinds of meditation and I like parts of them all so I’ve combined those parts into my own unique practice.
Although I completely understand why someone would do this, it’s really not a good idea. Buddhist meditation practices are more than 2500 years old. They’ve been tested and honed over time. Millions and millions of people have used them well, screwed them up, attained realization, and confused the hell out of themselves. We can learn from them and trust that the instructions have been honed by their experiences over centuries and we don’t need to reinvent the wheel.
The traditional practices are unimpeachable in their elegance, precision, and profundity. We usually try to skip out once the practice becomes difficult and think, well this particular practice isn’t for me, I’d better try another one. And you should try different practices to see which one suits you. But at some point you’ve got to stop trying them out and pick one. Stick with it. Stay. Let it unfold. Let it guide you instead of the other way around.
If you follow one piece of advice from this whole post, this would be the most important one.
12 comments
In 10+ years of meditating I have never lost my thoughts, become completely still or any of those other wonderful “aspirations”. I have, however, begun to see myself off the cushion more clearly, learned to pause before reacting, noticed the ways I “lose” myself – distraction is my favourite, found space allowing more compassion and acceptance into my life. On the cushion I notice with regular sitting AND sticking with the time I put aside for my sit, that I now flow with my experience. It is kind of like surfing my breath rather than watching it. Thoughts, sensations etc are more slippery and I don’t reach out for them impulsively or should that be compulsively?
Great posting – dharma is about reality.
My experience has been identical to yours. The benefits of meditation come to me way more off the cushion than on. Reality! Just as you say. At least for us.
i ordered your book.
(:
Leona – your comment brought chills to my spine. How beautiful! Thank you for sharing.
Susan – I printed out your newsletter because, I’m afraid, I had a lot of misconceptions about what I THOUGHT meditation should be. This will sound loony but I feel 10 lbs lighter. Now I can try again with an open mind and allow whatever happens, knowing that it will take practice – and that journey through practice is part of the beauty of it. I just have to remind myself of that – a lot.
Awesome. Seriously.
I have yet to explain meditation to my friends without it sounding like a new age riddle. I can explain its benefits during the day. People get that. I have favorite quotes like, “We watch movies in our mind all day long, all the stories of our lives. Meditation is like hitting pause, turning around and looking at the projector.” People kinda get that. But I’ve never been able to explain how practical I think it is. This entry helps crack that code … totally passing along to my friends.
-Sarah
Love that quote. Maybe enlightenment is turning the projector off.
I’ve had the same experience of trying to explain meditation for what it is: mysterious, practical, magical, ordinary, and, ultimately, inexplicable. So that’s kind of a fun conundrum. A funundrum.
Someday when you’re a meditation instructor, I bet you’ll come up with some kick-assedly inventive ways of describing it.
No. 5 is indeed important… Some teachers of Buddhist meditation read too much into the elegantly simple instructions given by the Buddha in the suttas and end up ‘improvising’ them, which ends up as complicating them, digressing from the original teachings. It’s quite unfortunate :-[ It's good to personally study the sutta sources from time to time to check against this, be one a teacher or student. Amituofo :-]
I can’t say for sure if what happened could be considered a complete cessation of thought, but for several years every night I went to sleep and devoted myself to stopping thought. At one point what I can only explain as my mind stopping from producing thoughts, and in an instant I was overcome with this strange warm laughter that filled my body I can only closely approximate this to the kind of laughter that you hear out of children and babies when they are their happiest. I have yet to repeat this experience and it has been at least 4 years. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.
This post is basically a marketing scam. White folk charging money, bleh, for information credited to Buddhist? What a country we live in.
Ouch.
Susan, I know, from reading your books that ‘Equanimity’ is one of your favorite words. It is said the English language often falls short of having a single word, a phrase or a complete statement of definition to cause true Empathy for the reader or listener. The word equanimity, the state of being calm, centered and composed, does evoke empathy to a meditator when used to describe the effects of meditation. I have been a meditator for over 30 years and have had very profound experiences during the act of meditation, but that is not the norm and is surely not
the primary goal. The profound effect of meditation is bringing calmness to your waking state. To practice meditation is to
know equanimity and there is not much more to be said about that . . .
- Stephen
[...] to a writer’s meditation retreat at the Shambhala Mountain Center in Red Feather Lakes, CO. Susan Piver, a bestselling author, was the [...]
Leave a Comment