What I’ve Learned From Meditation
Thoughts on a mindful practice
This Is Meditation
I usually sit on a pillow with my legs crossed, my hands in my lap, and my back against the wall.
It always starts with a few deep breaths and an initial focusing on the feeling of that breath passing through my nostrils.
Meditation is nothing more than paying attention — noticing things as they enter the arena of consciousness.
No, This Is Meditation
Of course, this is always easier said than done.
Most of meditation — at least in the beginning — is just a distracted attempt to focus on thoughts:
A heightened awareness of consciousness but a quickly shifting focus from the tickle in my nostril to the pain in my legs to the sound of planes flying overhead.
True, I notice these things, and I’m aware of my noticing them, but that doesn’t seem like some great leap beyond my everyday level of awareness.
I can usually keep thoughts (of the linguistic kind) abated for some brief moment while I pay attention to the sound of the plane’s jet engine rumbling through the clouds.
But what freedom I feel to not pay attention to these things — and then whatever comes next — is minimal, and thoughts don’t wait in turn for me to finishing noticing them.
Not A Means To an End
Those thoughts, quite often, land on the topic of meditation itself, and the benefits or progress or change it will bring about — what problems it might solve in my frustration or ambition.
But this is somewhat anathema to the practice.
Mediation, like most of life, needs to be done for its own sake.
Meditation can have its benefits — to your mental and physical well-being — and so it’s natural to sell the idea of meditation as a practice like a diet or exercise that will give the buyer some linear benefits — better focus, calmer days, productivity, confidence, whatever.
The problem with this isn’t that these promises are necessarily false; it’s just that they’re not really the point.
The reality of meditation is that if you do it in earnest, you will start to see the desire and need for all of these things as mere objects of consciousness that erupt and disintegrate as surely as the rumbling sound of the plane. As is the you part in all of that.
But that’s for you to discover;
You cannot be convinced of such things without the experience that motivates the convincing.
The point I’m making is merely that in order to get mediation going in earnest, you need to put aside the hopes and desires of it doing anything for you.
But that can be hard if it was the whole reason you sat down to meditate in the first place.
Waking Up
Perhaps a greater difficulty — for those of us not used to closing our eyes or being still for extended periods of time for anything other than sleep — is tying to not fall asleep.
This is why most meditation teachers will have you sit (or even stand or walk) while meditating, rather than lying down.
Because being awake is the fundamental goal.
With enough meditation practice, you may notice that being lost in thought feels like being asleep. Or at least becoming aware that you were lost in thought feels like waking up.
Wandering off with your thoughts — being unaware that you’re thinking — is not much better than being asleep.
And this is one of the benefits meditation practice is hoped to bring about:
To wake up to the reality of the drifting chaos of your conscious existence.
Because being lost in thought throughout life is not much better than being asleep.
Nothing Special
I’m not prone to mystical beliefs or to explanations of reality that require a wholesale rebuttal of scientific reasoning.
If meditation actually does anything, then it should presumably do those things without requiring you to hold any extraneous beliefs.
We should be able to get where we’re going by only needing to accept that meditation (from the point of view of the meditator) is a form of paying attention.
And that is perhaps the single most important instruction in the practice:
Pay attention.
You can be sitting, standing, riding a bike, making love or flying a helicopter;
From my understanding, there’s nothing special about any of those activities that stops them from being places to meditate, besides the particular risks of doing them with your eyes closed.
But if we want to see past some of our most stubborn illusions, it’s much easier to be somewhere quiet and comfortable and dark, where those stubborn illusions have fewer distractions to hide behind.
Then you just pay attention and try to notice what emerges into consciousness without having that attention be carried away by what emerges.
I, Itch
One thing you may notice early in practice is itches.
These may seem a nuisance at first, but instead of reaching to scratch an itch, you can just leave your hands where they are and just focus on it.
An itch can be a gateway to a deep realisation.
Because, in the space of consciousness, what is an itch?
They appear as little constellations of pin pricks and bright spots in whatever part of my consciousness that tells me they’re on my face.
But by the slippery mechanism of attention, as my focus on them fades and morphs onto some other sensation, the itch, for all conscious purposes, ceases to exist.
However, being a physical sensation, the signal doesn’t disappear, so the itch becomes a beacon to reorient my attention.
And as more attention is paid, a growing appreciation emerges for the complexity and reality of the sensation.
I can recognise the tiny panic to lift my arm and remove the annoyance as just another object in consciousness, separate from the true sensation of the itch itself, and in some sense far less real, or at least far less durable: ignore the alarm for long enough and it tends to turn itself off.
This in itself is a powerful realisation, one that can spill over into how we view the rest of life.
We face many itches — to indulge, to panic, to escape, to brag, to judge, to get angry — but they don’t all need to be scratched.
They can just come and go; they do not need to move us.
The big itch of life we struggle with — the root of many other itches — is the itch to latch onto thoughts and have them drag us away from the problems we might need to solve, or the painful realisations we may need to make.
One of the benefits of meditation, one of the less painful realisations it can lead you to, is that:
You are not the itch.
Seeing Everything
But everything in the arena of consciousness is kind of like an itch.
If I manage to glimpse the raw sensations in consciousness of my body before they’re colour-coded with meaning, all the warmth and pain seem to be just different textures painted onto empty space, just like the itch.
All these raw sensations share the same space as the brightness of the back of my eyelids or the strange patterns and flickering points and images burnt into my retina.
Physical sensations seem to share the same space as my visual field, though without being actually in it.
Though if I spend enough time there, it becomes difficult to tell whether what I’m “seeing” is in my visual field or just in my imagination.
Everything seems to exist in the visual field, but really, the visual field exists where everything else does: in consciousness.
Our eyes might see a lot, but what we actually “see” is only what makes its way to our consciousness — to the same place everything else goes.
Beyond Infinity
This is not isolated to the visual field.
The ringing in my ears can seem to fill the entire space of consciousness.
At first it always feels like it’s coming from my ears, but when I try to locate its source, it seems that there’s nowhere in consciousness that doesn’t contain the sound.
This is why it’s often referred to as infinite:
Consciousness is everywhere; and everything in consciousness fills it entirely; yet there’s always room for something to be added; and yet nothing inside seems to have a place.
If I try to direct my attention to sensations on a specific area of my body — my feet for example — it feels like trying to reorient my awareness in some different direction than where everything else has been appearing.
But a little bit more attention paid starts to reveal that this makes no sense — the sensations in my feet are not below me.
In fact, my “feet” seem to be set out in front of me.
Which, of course, also doesn’t make sense:
Those feelings aren’t in a direction — they are merely accompanied by the sensation of direction.
Sensations — the objects of consciousness — are not below you, or above you, or in front you, they just are.
Being Conscious
And they are you.
With enough noticing, it becomes impossible to distinguish between being aware of these objects, and being aware asthese objects.
And the same goes for the thing that’s aware.
When you look for what’s looking, the sense of looking is itself an object.
The sense of being an observer can be observed.
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