Unlearning Meditation: What to Do When the Instructions Get in the Way

by Jason Siff

  “A creative and illuminating approach to meditation practice.”

  —Joseph Goldstein, author of Insight Meditation

  “A radically illuminating book for practitioners to newly understand their meditation through loving interest in what is actually going on, beyond any instruction or ideal.”

  —Jack Kornfield, author of The Wise Heart

  “A wise, practical, and radical book that sheds new and wondrous light on dharma in the West.”

  —Joan Halifax Roshi, author of Being with Dying

  “Jason Siff is one of the most distinctive and engaging voices of the emerging Buddhist culture in the West.”

  —Stephen Batchelor, author of Confession of a Buddhist Atheist

  “[A] refreshing approach to meditation practice. Unlearning Meditation is an extremely valuable contribution to our emerging Western Dharma.”

  —Inquiring Mind

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  When we meditate, our minds often want to do something other than the meditation instructions we’ve been taught. When that happens repeatedly, we may feel frustrated to the point of abandoning meditation altogether. Jason Siff invites us to approach meditation in a new way, one that honors the part of us that doesn't want to do the instructions. He teaches us how to become more tolerant of intense emotions, sleepiness, compelling thoughts, fantasies—the whole array of inner experiences that are usually considered hindrances to meditation. The meditation practice he presents in Unlearning Meditation is gentle, flexible, permissive, and honest, and it’s been wonderfully effective for opening up meditation for people who thought they could never meditate, as well as for injecting a renewed energy for practice into the lives of seasoned practitioners.

  JASON SIFF is the head teacher of the Skillful Meditation Project. He teaches meditation and leads retreats throughout the United States and in Australia.

  Sign up to learn more about our books and receive special offers from Shambhala Publications.

  Or visit us online to sign up at shambhala.com/eshambhala.

  Unlearning

  Meditation

  What to Do When the Instructions Get in the Way

  Jason Siff

  Shambhala

  Boston & London

  2011

  SHAMBHALA PUBLICATIONS, INC.

  Horticultural Hall

  300 Massachusetts Avenue

  Boston, Massachusetts 02115

  www.shambhala.com

  © 2010 by Jason Siff

  Cover design by Gopa & Ted2, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Siff, Jason.

  Unlearning meditation: what to do when the instructions get in the way / Jason Siff.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes index.

  eISBN 978-0-8348-2314-3

  ISBN 978-1-59030-752-6 (pbk.: alk. paper)

  1. Meditation—Buddhism. I. Title.

  BQ5612.S54 2010

  294.3′4435—DC22

  2010004658

  To Jeremy Tarcher

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  PART ONE. UNLEARNING MEDITATION

  1. Being Realistic about Meditation

  2. Gentle Intentions

  3. Instructions as Rules

  4. Unlearning for Beginning Meditators

  5. Inconsistencies

  6. Putting Meditation Experiences into Words

  7. Personal Stories

  8. Qualities

  PART TWO. IMPASSES AND CALM SPACES

  9. Impasses in Meditation

  10. An Impassable Impasse

  11. A Partially Cleared Impasse

  12. Getting Through an Impasse

  13. Effortless Calm

  14. Meditating with Drifting Off and Waking Up

  15. Drifting to Absorption

  16. Questions Surrounding Samadhi

  PART THREE. MULTIPLE MEDITATIVE PROCESSES

  17. A Theory of the Meditative Process

  18. The Primary Transition

  19. Unlearning Meditation and the Generative Process

  20. The Three Developed Meditative Processes

  21. The Non–Taking-Up Process

  22. The Connected Process

  23. How to Use these Meditative Processes Skillfully

  PART FOUR. LEVELING THE HIERARCHY OF EXPERIENCES

  24. Assessing Meditative States

  A Postscript to Unlearning Meditation

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  E-mail Sign-Up

  INTRODUCTION

  Moving Beyond Meditator’s Guilt

  When I am invited to teach a new group of meditators, I like to know how each person meditates and, generally, what kinds of experiences they have. So I begin by asking them to say a little something about their meditation practice. The first thing almost everyone says is, “I don’t meditate every day.” This is said with a hint of shame.

  I might then reply with this compassionate suggestion, “You can meditate when you feel like meditating.”

  But then someone will usually say, “But aren’t we supposed to meditate every day?” And then they sometimes ask me, “Don’t you meditate every morning?”

  This is meditator’s guilt. It goes deep into the fabric of how we learn to meditate. Because when we learn how to meditate, we try to do the instructions perfectly, setting high standards for ourselves. We consequently experience periods of failure and inadequacy, along with the occasional moments of success, but it all adds up to guilt at not meditating often enough, not doing it well enough, not being the ideal meditator. And then we may also push ourselves too hard, sit with too much pain for too long, become intolerant of being caught up in our thoughts and feelings, and feel ashamed by the strength and tenacity of undesirable emotions.

  I’ve met quite a few people in the past two decades who, at one time or another, have either given up on meditation out of frustration or kept doing a meditation practice that is giving them more grief than peace. It doesn’t have to be this way. There are alternatives. The method I teach, called Recollective Awareness Meditation, is one of them.

  Just as we go through a period of learning how to meditate, we can also go through a period of unlearning meditation. This book will provide guidance on how to engage that process and in doing so will present the meditation experiences of people going through it. By reading other people’s experiences, you may find you are not alone in this—that others have been through a period of unlearning the unwanted habits of their meditation practice and have arrived at a new commitment to meditation, along with a greater interest in, and appreciation of, their inner worlds.

  I encounter many people who, once they hear that I am a meditation teacher, tell me that they can’t meditate because they think too much. Some of them are professors, scientists, and psychologists, who use their thinking in their work and have developed as human beings through using their minds. Because they have gotten a picture of meditation as requiring a quiet, thought-free mind, they feel they can’t do it. That is a real loss, a true shame. Recollective Awareness is an approach to meditation that not only doesn’t prohibit thinking, but teaches a way of looking into your thoughts so that you can learn things about the thinking process itself. By taking this approach, paradoxically, many people find that their thinki
ng minds actually quiet down, and they find themselves more able to focus on the physical and emotional sides of their experiences.

  The effects of unlearning meditation can be many and varied. A wide range of emotions can arise. What has been hidden from awareness can be revealed. And people open up to a wide range of calm, tranquil states of mind. This can be a powerful meditation practice. But it is not for everyone; no single meditation practice is. It meets the needs of those experienced meditators who are seeking a gentle, open, and insightful form of meditation, as well as those who are new to meditation and are looking for a simple and effective way to begin a meditation practice.

  Unlearning Meditation is not a book that rejects traditional meditation practices. You are not asked to drop your existing meditation practice for good and take up an altogether new form of meditation. Instead, this book provides observations and insights into how people meditate, what they experience, and what would be useful and skillful ways of being with what comes up in meditation sittings for most people. In my two decades of teaching meditation, there have been many instances of people who have unlearned specific meditation practices, only to return later to those practices with greater flexibility and interest, move on to another practice, or even develop their own way of meditating.

  This approach to meditation comes directly out of my practice and study of the Dharma. It may appear to be more psychologically oriented than many other approaches, since it is a meditation practice for becoming aware of your thoughts and feelings; understanding your views, ideals, and beliefs; and seeing into how your mind functions both skillfully and otherwise. The kinship between psychotherapy and meditation is there, naturally, but the agendas are often different, and their direction (or trajectory) is different also. The value of Recollective Awareness, and I would say of Buddhist meditation practices in general, is to become aware of the dependently arisen nature of all mental phenomena and, through that way of knowing one’s experience, to become wiser, gentler, and more peaceful.

  The Buddhist concept of dependent arising, or dependent origination, is a way of looking at things that lies at the heart of meditation practice. The basic principle of dependent origination is, simply stated, that certain states, or conditions, naturally and inevitably lead to others: “When one thing is, so is another; when one thing arises, so does another.” Our inner worlds are complex and varied, and each experience is composed of interrelated elements. Dependent arising is fundamentally a way of knowing how our experiences are put together and how they are kept alive.

  With this method, we are first trying to get to know our mind by being gentle and permissive rather than starting out being disciplinarians. Meditation does not have to be an exercise to do, a chore to get through, or a thing to accomplish. It is through gentleness and kindness to ourselves in meditation that we can learn how to become genuinely interested in how our mind operates: we can make astute observations, pursue avenues of exploration, test out hypotheses. When you are interested in the dependently arisen inner world of your meditation sittings, meditator’s guilt has no hold or sway over you. Your reasons for meditating are your own.

  PART ONE

  Unlearning

  Meditation

  The Basic Practice

  1

  Being Realistic about Meditation

  Meditation is about a tension between allowing your mind as it is and the meditation instructions you use. The story of meditation, regardless of the tradition, is about the way our wandering mind and the meditation instructions work together, fight, or try to have nothing to do with each other. Most people think there should be perfect harmony between your mind and the meditation instruction you’re following—this is meditation, after all! That’s a romantic idea of meditation.

  What we are concerned with here are realistic experiences of meditation, ones that feature conflicts, doubts, and desires as well as peaceful states, profound insights, and deep internal changes. Each person’s meditation experience is a story with many dimensions to it—it is never an account of following an instruction perfectly and then someday achieving the promise of that practice. It just doesn’t happen to real people that way. At least not to anyone I know.

  The kinds of meditation stories I’m most familiar with are about unlearning meditation. While learning meditation involves adhering to particular instructions, unlearning meditation is a way of meditating that acknowledges your mind as it is in meditation and explores the tension that exists between that and the instructions. It is a way both to unlearn an existing meditation practice and to begin a new one. The descriptions of meditation sittings in this book come from students who have embarked on a meditation practice that begins with allowing your mind as it is in meditation.

  I will begin with my own story.

  When I started meditating at age fourteen, I was first given the instruction to focus on a mantra, as was the common practice back then. I would sit for twenty to thirty minutes trying to stay with the single-syllable sound, repeating it over or lengthening the sound, attempting to fill all of my time in meditation with it, reminding myself to keep it alive whenever my mind wandered. I didn’t stick with that practice for more than a few weeks, as it didn’t seem to do anything. During that period of my life, I would also take time out during the day to lie on my back on a couch or sit in an armchair with my eyes closed. At those times I would let my mind wander and allow myself to go to sleep if I was so inclined. Often I just thought about things, usually about what I was reading, mostly Eastern religion and existentialism. But occasionally, I would flow into a state where I watched parades of inner images, and with that came a certain lightness and joy. I wouldn’t have called it meditation back then, because meditation meant sitting cross-legged with a straight back, with attention focused on my mantra.

  I saw meditation in much the same way most beginning meditators see it: When I was doing the meditation instructions, even unsuccessfully, I was meditating. When I wasn’t following a prescribed set of instructions—when I was letting my mind do as it pleased—I wasn’t meditating. Since there was no one to give me the kind of guidance I now give students, I didn’t know that what I was experiencing lying on my back could become the basis for a viable meditation practice. That wasn’t meditation, and what was supposed to be meditation wasn’t working for me, so I dropped it altogether for a number of years and for the most part forgot that I could keep my body still for an hour or two and have my mind settle down and enter into a world of imagery.

  In my early twenties, I tried other forms of meditation that came out of reading books on Tibetan Buddhism, but I soon realized that I needed to learn them from a teacher. I went to Nepal with the intention of pursuing a spiritual path but found myself teaching English instead. It was hard for me to connect with the Tibetan teachers, devotees, and teachings I encountered there, but I am glad I tried.

  One day during our time in Nepal, my wife and I decided to go with a friend to a Tibetan nunnery in the foothills where a venerated lama was speaking. We hiked past a Vipassana meditation center on the way up to the temple, and a few hundred yards up the road I picked up a piece of paper lying on the ground. It was one of the center’s brochures. I read it as we walked up the hill. All it contained was the daily schedule, which consisted of several hours a day of meditation, and the rules for a retreat, which were quite strict. I thought that if I went to that Vipassana center for ten days, I would surely get a serious meditation practice and would then be able to realize my spiritual aspirations for this life.

  I called up the center, which taught the meditation method of the Indian Vipassana teacher S. N. Goenka, and enrolled in the next ten-day retreat, which was only a couple of weeks away. I recall trying to meditate on my own in preparation for the retreat, going back to using a mantra mostly, but without much success. I reckoned that when the retreat rolled around, I would really learn how to meditate.

  The retreat began in the evening with meditation instructions. I sat in a
full lotus position on a flat cushion. The meditation hall was a cement building. The floors were cold and hard, as there was no carpeting. I did as instructed. I brought my attention to the tip of my nostrils and noticed the sensations of my breath moving in and out. It was easier to feel the breath go in at first, but after a few minutes, I could detect the air brushing past my nostrils and upper lip, however faintly. My breathing started to speed up, making it easier to notice. I was surprised when the bell rang.

  The next day we got up at around 4:00 A.M. and began sitting at 4:30. Once again I sat in full lotus, and as soon as I put my attention on my nostrils, my breathing quickened. I stayed focused on one breath following another for the next two hours. I remember seeing an image of a man in one of those heavy metal diving suits. He was floating deep underwater with barnacles all over the suit, as if he had been there for ages. I quickly interpreted that image as referring to an aspect of myself that was still unconscious, as I was fond of Jungian psychology at that time. But I was able to let go of such thoughts easily and keep my attention fastened on my breath.

  A couple of days later, we were asked to switch from observing the breath to focusing on bodily sensations. On that day we were given instructions to scan our bodies from the top of our heads to the tips of our toes. This was done in a slow manner, taking about ninety minutes to do it completely. I found that I could also do that practice with good concentration, and after a few days I began to experience a free-flow of sensations up and down my body, which was what was supposed to happen when doing the practice consistently over the course of a retreat. I felt adept at that way of meditating as well. Here I had learned two new meditation techniques that I could do well.

  I had found my meditation practice for life, or so I thought. After the retreat it was so easy to follow the meditation instruction to just notice the breath at the nostrils. There was hardly any thinking, my mind rarely wandered away from the breath, and my awareness of the air moving in and out of my nostrils was also soft and gentle. There was no force involved. There was harmony between my mind as it was and the instruction I used. I not only wished it would last forever but actually thought it would.