December 12, 2008

Why do you want to meditate?

People come to meditation for lots of different reasons. Maybe you are stressed out and think that meditation will be a relaxation technique for you. Maybe you are an athlete and you coach said that meditation will improve your sports performance. Maybe you're on a spiritual path and think that meditation will either accelerate your travel down that path or somehow make it easier for you to get to where you want to go.

Maybe you have some physical illness and think that meditation will help you cope with that better. Perhaps you have some pain and have heard that meditation can be helpful for pain relief or healing. Maybe you want to develop psychic powers and heard stories of Buddhist monks and Hindu monks who've been seen in two places at once and you want to learn astral party tricks, too.

Maybe you simply recognize that your mind feels out of control, and that meditation will help calm your thinking and make you more effective in all aspects of your life.

At this moment, I'm not going to toss out my thoughts about whether those expectations are realistic or not. We'll save that for another time. For now, let me just say this: It's important to know why you want to meditate. Because if you're not clear about your goals for meditation, you'll have no way of assessing accurately whether you are moving toward your goals. And you also won't be able to tell if meditation actually has anything to do with your travels toward your goals.

In other words, you might find that you are moving toward your goals and you believe your meditation practice is helping you do that. Great. Or you might find that you're not getting closer to your goals and you might come to the conclusion that meditation isn't solving your problem.

But maybe it's not the meditation that's responsible for your seeming success or seeming failure.

It might be the particular meditation technique that you're trying that's the issue. Or, maybe it's your very ideas about meditation — ideas that you may have learned from books, or tapes, or gurus, or experts, or doctors, or psychologists. It doesn't matter where you got the idea, but maybe, the ideas you have about meditation are what's getting in the way of achieving your meditative goals.

When I was eight years old and first discovered meditation, I very quickly got the idea that meditation was going to be the cure for every possible thing that ailed me. If I was having problems in school, meditation was a solution. If I wanted to improve my athletic performance, meditation was the answer. When I discovered a spiritual path, meditation was the way to the ultimate goal — enlightenment (or, least, what I thought enlightenment meant).

When I looked more carefully, what I really hoped was that if I meditated long enough, well enough, properly enough, using the right meditation technique, with the right teacher… that, somehow, eventually I would be immune to all forms of human suffering. I would be happy forever. Nothing would bother me, not even my death.

Now my thoughts about meditation have evolved quite a bit since then, but I have to tell you that the biggest obstacle to achieving any of of my meditation goals not the meditation technique, was not whether I had gone to enough meditation classes, or spent enough time meditating. My very ideas about meditation were the biggest obstacle to having what I truly wanted.

So take a few moments, and just wonder. Ask yourself, "Why do I want to meditate?".

You may want to make a few notes. And when you come up with an answer, you might ask yourself another question: Why do I even want that goal?

In other words, if you say, "I want to meditate to have peace of mind," well, why would you want peace of mind?

I know that sounds like a crazy question, but maybe underneath the initial desire is something more essential. Or, maybe you'll find that what you want doesn't really require meditation.

You might find that you want to meditate to be a better parent. But that the time you spend trying to find a quiet corner of your house actually makes you more distant. Maybe you just need a different way to relate to your children, instead of a way to innoculate yourself against them. Maybe you can get what you want more easily than you think… and maybe it doesn't require sitting on a meditation cushion.

Now, trust me, I'm not telling you NOT to meditate. After all, I teach meditation!

I'm just playing with the idea of looking carefully at your goals and motivations. Maybe life, like meditation, can be easier than you think