Joriki Revisited I

I've been thinking about the limited application of meditation to daily life for most people--the limitations in how it is presented, the limitations in how it is applied, and the physical-emotional and time constraints as well. While there may never be a moment when every sort of "meditation" in inapplicable, there has probably been no single lifetime where meditation is always applied in each moment. So the question of how meditation can be both accessible and felt to be valuable has stuck with me since I'd had the feeling of figuring out what meditation is--to a personally satisfactory extent rather than to a conclusive extent.

As a trained therapist, motivation stands out as central to the practice of meditation. Certainly, the groups we are in make a huge difference in our focus and motivation, but if we set culture and communication aside for a moment, attention and emotion in the individual seem to go hand in hand. Since emotions constantly shift, maintaining one's emotional investment in an activity entails maintaining one's sense of benefit/value or returning repeatedly to one's sense of benefit/value in said activity.

In many meditative traditions, though, we are told that we do not actively "do" meditation and that in fact trying to do can disrupt meditation. This places a nearly universal emotional fact of life (emotional shifting and the need for motivation) against meditation (as non-doing). And while this non-doing may make enough sense from an experienced meditator's standpoint (to say nothing whatsoever of enlightened meditator's), those without a certain amount of experience and familiarity still look for some motivation to continue. (At times, most experienced meditator's also end up looking for a specific feeling of motivation.)

While the benefits of any particular type of "meditation" or technique can be laid out, there seems to be something central and convincing (if not always motivating) that experienced meditators refer to within themselves even when they cannot speak of it in a motivating manner. I want to distinguish slightly, then, between the benefits and techniques that can be categorized and that aspect of ineffability. Besides all the reasons or explanations, something is convincingly right in a very fundamental sense. It is rare that any of us deeply question whether love feels good, and meditation can have a similarly unassailable feeling-quality. Before that quality is firmly established in one's history and consciousness, we look for motivation.

At first, I tried to categorize types of meditation by technique or by benefits. I then tried to figure a "best way" for Americans around my age to engage meditation--by mindfulness, relaxation/stress reduction, stories around absorption, bhakti, focus on breathing or mantra, etc. Same old story. More recently, I have been circling one of the most basic experiences involved in many forms of meditation--nonattachment. While nonattachment may be hard to describe well, it is certainly not ineffable or intangible. One teacher, when asked what it is like to let go, handed the questioner a pencil and asked the other person to grip that pencil tightly. The teacher then asked the person what it takes to let go of the pencil. We simply unclench. This is also a very fundamental experience, and the connection between the physical and psychological aspects are obvious. You unclench your fist and your mind unclenches. This is the basic feeling of nonattachment. People like speaking of "letting go", and when proponents of "letting go" go too far with it, they often demonize the thinking mode of mental operations. I would ask them how many minds they have, whether their "thinking" mind is a different "mind". That seems as ridiculous to me as to say that when I am sleeping I am a different person than when I am awake--my sleeping mind and waking mind are different in certain ways without being different minds.

Your meditative mind is not somewhere else when you are feeling not-so-meditative. It is one mind. It is mind. You don't have to change your mind like you change your shoes for different activities. Your meditation is never somewhere else. Never. And while letting go feels relaxing, holding tightly to letting go is not.