I was a meditation failure.

I started meditation when I was 8, after buying the "Hypno-disk" from the Johnson Smith novelty catalog. The instructions for the Hypnodisk, in addition to showing you how to put anyone into a hypnotic trance (my parents got a letter asking me to stop hypnotizing my elementary school class), included simple meditation instructions.

I got more serious about meditating when I was 14 and began doing biofeedback to cure my migraine headaches. Part of the biofeedback training included guided meditations and guided imagery, plus basic relaxation and meditation techniques.

I began doing Kriya yoga meditation after reading Autobiography of a Yogi, a book which is probably responsible for more people hopping onto the meditative path than almost any other. In fact, my parents have a fond memory of answering the front door to find a very confused older Indian man — he was shocked that the meditator he was supposed to meet with was a 15 year old kid.

I continued to practice various meditation techniques on my own throughout college, where I did cognitive psychology research, investigating how people acquire and process information (little did I know how this would come back later, as you'll soon see). During college, I hung out with a number of spiritual leaders, current and former Buddhist and Hindu monks, well-known authors on Eastern philosophy. But I don't think my meditation practice really got serious until I did my first 10 day Vipassana retreat in 1985.

What happened in that retreat is a LONG story… let's just say that I don't recommend going from 10 days of silence straight to the A train in Harlem… it can be a bit of a shock to the system. I'll save the details for another post. But after that first retreat, I was a serious meditator — I did about 20 retreats that involved doing sitting meditation for up to 16 hours a day, I often practiced on my own for 2 hours a day, and I absorbed every meditation book I could find, eventually compiling a database of my books that I took with me everywhere so that I wouldn't accidentally buy a book I already owned (I think I bought 4 copies of Sri Aurobindo - Adventures in Consciousness).

I became friends and studied with Tibetan Buddhists, Zen Buddhists, Hindu yogis, Tai Chi players and Chi Gung masters, Theravada Buddhists from various lineages, you name it.

Now, after all of this, why would I call myself a meditation failure?

Well, let me answer that from an odd angle (much of this blog will be looking at things from odd angles). Knowing many meditation teachers, I knew of many conversations that were happening behind closed doors. Conversations about the students, about the teachers themselves, about the teachers' teachers, about practice. Suffice it to say, I was surprised to hear more than a few conversations that sounded like:

"None of the students are getting to the levels they should be attaining."

"None of us teachers are getting to the various stages we should be attaining."

"We're having these powerful experiences, but still have trouble in our relationships, still blow up at bad drivers, don't have fulfilling (or lucrative) jobs, etc."

It was valuable for me to hear these reports from "behind the scene," because I wasn't getting what I was expecting from meditation either. And it was great to find out that it wasn't just me; that the "higher ups" were having the same problem consistently reproducing the results we wanted and expected.

Sure, I'd have cool experiences, but was my life really changing? Was the way I saw the world and related to myself and others being fundamentally affected? Or was it that I would get a "dose" of meditation that would then wear off, requiring another dose?

Well, it was more of the latter.

But there was one thing I heard from the teachers that really interested me — what many of the teachers were doing in their private practice was not what they were teaching to students. "Well," they would explain, "if you want to get to San Francisco from New York, you need to travel across the country." "Hmmmm…" I would ponder, "Why can't you just start at the Golden Gate Bridge instead?"

They wouldn't teach the "advanced stuff" first because that wasn't the way they were taught. That wasn't part of the lineage. Their guru didn't do it that way.

Well, so what?

Just because someone before you did it one way, how do we know that's the best way?

Besides, many of the teachers' teachers didn't even speak English. Maybe they taught a simpler version of things due to the language barrier? I would often see, say, a Japanese teacher say more to a Japanese student in one hour than I heard him say to the English-speaking students in a year!

Finally, I realized that the entire foundation of my meditation practice was based on one core idea: That I was broken in some (possibly subtle) way, and that meditation would fix me. That if I meditated long enough, hard enough, with the right technique or the right teacher, I would become free of the unpleasant parts of my self and I would skate through life with hardly a ripple of discomfort.

Back in 2001, I lost the ability to believe I was a "self-improvement project." And since my meditation practice was all about self-improvement, I stopped. Cold turkey… or tofu.

But that didn't stop my fascination with the mind and with meditation. In fact, I would say that without my urge to fix myself, my investigation was more intense, and more clear. I wasn't trying to prove anything to myself in order to keep my motivation high, I was really curious:

Does this stuff work? And, if so, how?

How does meditation fit in a Western lifestyle?

Can it be separated from the philosophies or teachings or teachers?

Now, I know some people meditation for relaxation or stress-relief. That's fine… my investigation included that too… Like, "is meditation really the best way to get rid of stress and relax?"

While I would argue that I have found some answers to some of the questions about meditation, what's been more interesting is the continued investigation, the other questions that pop up, and the conversation about meditating and the mind that has now become this blog.

I look forward to your comments, thoughts, arguments, complaints, jokes, insights… and much more.

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