~10 minute read
Reflections on different phases of meditation, what it means to deepen practice, and how an emphasis on trust, confidence, and humility can allow the practice to unfold.
You don’t know what you don’t know
There’s a Deepening Meditation Practice Course coming up in January that Upali and I co-teach (details), which had me pondering who exactly this course is for. We have some text on our website that says it is for “intermediate to advanced practitioners” (the text may have initially been AI-generated ^_^). It got me thinking about whether there really are intermediate meditators and what would be a useful way to self-identify in terms of meditation experience and orientation.
At my talks and Day of Practices (or is it Days of Practice like Days of Our Lives?), I sometimes poll those practitioners I don’t already know by asking how much time they have spent meditating (in their regular formal sits, their consistency of home practice, the number of months or years they’ve practised for, time spent on retreat). I’m using time spent practising as a proxy for how deep they have gone in their practice, which has some utility but obviously doesn’t tell the whole story.
The thing that seems to more reliably point to a high level of experience is to talk to them and see if they have confidence, faith, and trust that the practice does something. This trust is not because they have some high level of skill, but comes with the humility of relating to the practice in such a way that they know it will do what it needs to do. Allow me to expand on this.
When I was studying music technology, we learned a piece of software called Max/MSP (now known as Max, and yes this was very confusing at a time when everyone was using Apple Mac computers). This is a graphical programming language where the user drops in boxes, types certain commands into them, then links them to other boxes. Some of those boxes generate sounds, some manipulate video frames, some perform mathematical functions or send control information. It was a lot of fun for me. I felt like I learned something key about how to program computers: writing explicit instructions, debugging by checking the output to see what wasn’t doing what I intended, and building up a system by breaking the problem down into small components and building it bit-by-bit. I dove into it. I was obsessed. I completed all the tutorials, started making my own projects, and generally could not get enough of programming — oftentimes to the detriment of my sleep.
In the communities around Max/MSP they said that there was no such thing as an intermediate user. That people using the software either were beginners, or if they had given it time, were now serious users. This was partly because of the steep learning curve. People tended to start from a place where they didn’t really have any idea of what to do. Then, if they were able to persevere through a period of confusion and bewilderment where they made mistakes, experimented, and learned how to use the software, they would emerge on the other side with an understanding of how to program and get the computer to do what they wanted. At the time, the developers of Max/MSP explicitly didn’t offer intermediate resources: everything was geared either to beginners to understand how the system worked, or for more experienced users to learn about additional tools and modules they could incorporate to extend their patches. The understanding there was that people who had some experience could then figure things out and didn’t require explicit instruction. They worked it out themselves.
When I found meditation and realised it was something I could learn systematically, I did something similar to when I learned to program. I absorbed the 500 pages of The Mind Illuminated, rereading sections to clarify and motivate myself for practice sessions. I learned as much as I could. I was fascinated by the challenge of getting my mind to move in certain ways, to cultivate skilful qualities, and to understand something about the workings of the mind. It was like trying to program a computer that sometimes would follow the instruction I gave, but mostly it wouldn’t. Plus it had lots of emotions! The outputs of the system were rich and complex in different ways. Whereas with programming I could print the output to a terminal, or watch a graphical interface, with meditation I had to find other ways to troubleshoot, to guide, and to get a sense that the practice was doing something. It was challenging, but the challenge was what kept me interested. Gradually I started to see that I could cultivate helpful qualities of mind, that I could move the mind in certain ways, and that I could work with hindrances and obstacles.
I felt like I went from beginner to intermediate in the sense of developing a set of skills that enabled meditation to have some noticeable effect. The practice started making a difference, particularly in my experience of daily life and the ability calm myself and regulate emotions. But what I didn’t realise at the time, is that I’d actually become overconfident and thought that I could fix any problems I had with meditation. Because meditation worked, it was the answer to everything. This became a problem when I found myself unable to meditate my way out of difficulty, namely the burnout and exhaustion I experienced during COVID lock-downs due to taking on too much activist work, among a few other factors such as career dissatisfaction. I found myself stuck in a place that I thought I could use my skills to meditate out of, but my sits had become marathon sessions of twitching; my days filled with frustration and agitation. What got me out of this was feedback and repeated guidance from a meditation teacher, as well as an intensive process of therapy that helped me see how my approach wasn’t working.
This is where comparing meditation to programming falls a little flat. There is something that happens when working with the mind where it eventually becomes a process of non-doing that arrives at a solution. There’s a realisation there that the problem we have been trying to solve has been stated incorrectly from the beginning — in fact it is exactly this incorrect stating of the problem that causes all the stress and resistance. Meditation eventually becomes a practice of letting go of these preconceptions and formulations. It’s an unbinding that allows us to see a different truth in all of our experience.
I would argue that the difference in outlook as one progresses from beginner, to intermediate, to advanced practitioner is a sense of confidence and an ability to self-guide. At first, this self-guidance is about learning different techniques, learning how to move the mind with intention, and how to navigate hindrances. Figuring out how to use intention (read: mental decisions) rather than forceful, pushy effort is a big one. This phase will also often involve learning about tips and tricks, hearing about how others work through certain experiences, and gaining theoretical or conceptual knowledge to support the practice. There’s often a stage where this works very well and leads to a distinct increase in mental qualities such as calm and clarity.
But this self-guidance isn’t about always figuring it out. Eventually it becomes more of a meta-skill. Knowing that meditation doesn’t always give you what you want, but trusting that it gives you what you need. Or framed another way: being able to see meditation as an intimate connection with the unfolding of experience, just as it is. Knowing that for whatever comes up there is something true and real about that. That there can be an OKness with whatever arises that leads to doing less resisting.
This trusting is actually a bigger space of holding, such that it also allows doing and appropriately responding, without the friction of resisting the experience. I want to be clear here: I’m not saying everyone should practise just letting go. It’s a good idea to use the techniques and tools we have for balancing the mind and cultivating mental qualities. I teach these skills and love talking to people about meditation techniques. What I am saying is that there will be a point where these do not work. There will be a time when we can’t solve the problem, can’t control the situation. Then we need something else.
Another moment from university that stuck with me: I was talking a lecturer about a very skilled musician who I really admired. I was commenting on how on listening to their improvisation, they seemed to have mastered their instrument. The lecturer, who knew this musician well, said that the reason their playing is so skilled is because they know how much they don’t know. While this might point to a Dunning-Kruger effect (overestimating capability in areas we don’t know that much about and then underestimating capability in areas we know more about), I would posit that it also points to a kind of openness, humility, and acceptance in realising that there is always more to unfold. There’s a trust in the process itself, in the exploration and discovery, that is not so reliant on knowing how to do something well right now, of controlling the outcome.
To really trust in the process itself means embracing our own finitude. This trust can be terrifying. To really know that this physical pain, this rumination, this suffering is exactly how it is, right now — this is hard to fathom. To recognise our limited agency and the unreliability of phenomena is difficult. To see that the way we have been viewing reality is at a deep level causing our own suffering is challenging to our whole conception of self and world. Because it is difficult, we practice together.
Experienced practitioners know that they can’t do it on their own. Yes, they have trust in their ability to practise and the skills that they’ve worked on. But they also know that there are some things you can’t know about yourself. In fact, this is one of the core tenets of Buddhism: that all beings who haven’t yet reached full awakening are all operating out of delusion — a fundamental misunderstanding of how things are — that causes suffering. If we knew this delusion, then it wouldn’t be delusion and we wouldn’t be suffering. You don’t know what you don’t know. However, what we don’t know can be revealed in various ways. One of the most expedient ways to reveal delusion is by cultivating calm and clarity, then being in relationship with others in ways where we can inhabit an openness that helps to bring to light these misunderstandings.
In the Deepening Meditation Practice Course, we use the word Deepening because it points in a direction rather than to something specific. There are many qualities that you might want to deepen and it’s quite likely that meditation can help you to do this. It might even be worth asking yourself what qualities you want to deepen. Perhaps more importantly though, deepening also means to deepen your relationship with practice. To deepen your connection. To deepen your trust in the unfolding of practice, happening exactly as it needs to. This then allows for deepening of freedom and meaningfulness. No matter whether you consider yourself new or experienced; beginner, intermediate, or advanced; there is always opportunity to deepen.