by Jason Siff
In fact, allowing drowsiness may result in states of mind people are told to avoid in meditation practice. I have met many meditators who have never allowed themselves to drift off in meditation and so have only briefly touched upon such experiences before abruptly bringing their attention back to some appropriate object of meditation, such as the breath. If the instructions in this book are your first exposure to meditation, you will probably find little resistance to drifting off and waking up in meditation. But if there is resistance to letting your mind drift where it will, then look at the resistance and be gentle with it.
I have already mentioned that this approach will threaten your need to control your mind, so it is quite natural to be afraid of any unbidden and unfamiliar state that arises. You might be inclined in some cases to meet these calm experiences with distrust, because they might be strange and disorienting. By accepting them and letting them progress as they will, you may begin to slowly develop trust in this paradoxical process of drifting off and waking up.
This way of entering calm states through staying with what you experience is not only a gentle, receptive way of settling the mind, but I believe it is also psychologically safer and more grounded than approaches that accelerate the process, such as practices that require long periods of sitting, focusing intently on objects, and moving energy through your body.
In addition to the difficulties inherent in trusting being open to our mind as it is in meditation, there is another, more worldly concern about how we appear to those around us as we meditate in a group setting. How you look to others as you sit on the cushion can affect your willingness to allow your mind to drift to the point of being okay with going toward sleep—because allowing that will likely lead to a slumping posture and drooping head. You won’t look like the athletic, awake, and aware meditator found in magazine photos. As your chin slides down your chest and saliva forms at the corners of your mouth, you may feel a little embarrassed and uneasy at having taken my suggestions. And when you slip into a peaceful sleep only to be awakened by the sound of your own snoring, you may curse me under your breath and regret taking up this practice. I don’t blame you. I understand this situation all too well.
We are part of a meditation culture that has certain values, of which this approach might seem to go against the grain by placing a value on staying with your experience over correct meditation posture. Though this brings up another point, that what I am calling an experience of drifting off and waking up is more commonly looked at as mind-wandering, fantasy, or daydreaming.
So not only am I advising you to practice what would be considered poor form in meditation sitting, but I am also telling you to be “unmindful” and “indulgent”—using some of the prevailing meditation culture’s language. This may be a tougher hurdle for some of you to get over than the one allowing your posture to sag. It could seem that allowing your mind to drift in meditation is unproductive, self-indulgent, and lazy—that it will lead nowhere but to more daydreaming and fantasies. You would be falling asleep in meditation and have sittings where all you did was “space out.” It wouldn’t seem like much of a meditation practice, and certainly not one you would be proud of.
You can no doubt see why most meditation teachers don’t teach what I am advocating here and why calming the mind is often taught from the point of view of instructions. With instructions to focus on an object of meditation, you can also have rules that are in accordance with the common perception of meditation: You sit with a straight back, fully awake, concentrating on the primary object of meditation. You don’t let your back cave in, and you straighten up whenever a downward pull or slumping position is detected. You wake yourself up whenever sleepy. You keep your attention on the primary object and never stray from it. Now that sounds like meditation!
We can go in circles around these issues. I could try harder to convince you to trust the mind as it is in meditation. I could also direct criticism at instruction-based practices. But I could also defend instruction-based practices and give a knowledgeable critique of my own approach. These are basic debating skills of which many of us are capable. But no matter which side wins the debate, we might not be really convinced. At least, I wouldn’t.
So let’s move from ideas about meditation practice to the experiences of meditators. The initial instruction about bringing your attention to the touch of the hands, your rear against the cushion, or your body sitting can create conditions for your mind to slip into calm states. One thing that this simple instruction does is take your attention away from your head and torso, where we tend to locate thinking and feeling, and bring your awareness to a part of your body where much of your experience is just sensations unrelated to emotions. Also, focusing for any length of time on anything still, such as the body sitting, will naturally relax the mind and can make you drowsy.
The following example, taken from a woman who began Recollective Awareness Meditation several years ago, is one where the touch of hands is included in conjunction with other rhythmic, hypnotic objects.
I felt the breath in my hands, actually my pulse, and heard the clock at the same rhythm. A few thoughts and some tension in my head with a sense of weightiness. I stayed with the hands and pulse a lot. Then there was a sudden shift to visions and poetry—snapshot scenes of canoeing in Canada and poem possibilities. Then a sudden shift to brilliant sparkles of colored lights, round bulbs on thin tubes, lasting for just a brief moment. Then undulating granular colors that came and went. It was restful, peaceful, and at times I would come back to the pulse in my hands and a witness viewpoint from within the body. Mind was untroubled, felt settled, calm, accepting, and a little spacey and tired, but gently so, not unpleasant—it was like a welcome respite—the bell startled me.
Once the meditator’s mind got settled, she shifted to seeing images and colors and then to a poem she was working on, and her attention left the touch of the hands, her pulse, and the ticking of the clock. It is natural in these calm states to lose contact with what leads into the state and not to return to those objects of concentration. But if someone follows an instruction to keep returning to the breath or a mantra or a specific visualization, then the natural progression of the state is interrupted rather then furthered. The image of canoeing and the possibilities for a poem appear as new objects to focus on, and they are later replaced by brilliant sparkles of colored lights and the undulating granular colors. To go with those images and ideas, the meditator had to allow her attention to leave the pulse in her hands.
Because of the drowsiness associated with drifting into these calm inner spaces, many meditators fight these experiences, that is, until they find out that this is just what happens to most people who use these instructions. There was one student, several years ago, who never got the message that these instructions would lead to drifting off in meditation. That was because he was in prison and did not have access to a teacher’s comments until he had sat this way for a few weeks. His journal records many instances of trying to ward off sleep, of not letting himself go with the drowsiness. The only time it was quiet enough for him to meditate was in the early morning, so he also saw that as contributing to his sleepiness.
The reason that sleepiness or drowsiness has been so attacked by some traditional approaches has its source in ancient Buddhist meditation manuals, in which ardent meditators are instructed to keep themselves awake using a variety of methods. Sleepiness was considered a hindrance to meditation. And yet, tranquillity was considered a state of mind worthy of cultivation. Experientially, when most people feel tranquil, they also feel a little sleepy. Unfortunately, the ideal that is presented to meditators is to be both tranquil and awake, which gets in the way of becoming tranquil first and more wakeful later.
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Meditating with Drifting Off and Waking Up
Meditating with this drifting-off and waking-up process is not always easy, nor is it straightforward. Many times we’ll find ourselves in a tranquil state without remembering how we got there. It is
as though the memory has been obliterated and we can’t retrieve it. We don’t know how it happened or what preceded what. All we know is that the thinking has changed or died down or vanished, and everything is calmer.
When we go into a calm state from a train of thought, it’s usually hard to remember the transition. There is also often a loss of the content of the thinking and no memory of what was so important or compelling about it. Here is an example from a student’s journal.
The whole train of thought in the beginning seemed quite important. It suddenly and completely dropped off. I can remember nothing about what I had been thinking about and what mattered about it. I see how I am drawn into habitually making up conjectures about this—but actually am more amazed that it could drop like this.
The meditator is trying to understand why the thinking dropped, but since she has no memory of the transition, she has to conjecture why. This is one of the main problems we encounter when we don’t have awareness of how things came about. We speculate about the causes and come up with a theory or explanation about how things happened, but we really don’t know. We have no remembered experience to refer back to. So one of the reasons for remembering the transition is to get a clearer picture of how such elusive states actually arise within our sittings. From my perspective, it is important to get a glimpse of the conditions that give rise to these experiences in order to better understand these states, to use them, and to benefit from them.
We can often remember a transitional event when it is accompanied by an image or an energetic shift, as in this meditator’s experience.
I had a sensation in my abdomen, and then I saw a hand going under it, and then I get a gentle rush of energy up my body. That normally means I have transitioned into another state, where my mind is momentarily clear and tranquil.
In this kind of transition, you can be focused on the breath, on sounds, on body sensations, thoughts, emotions, images, or anything that comes into your awareness, even shopping lists or a song that keeps going around in your mind. You can’t rule anything out as a possible way to enter into a tranquil state.
Staying with intense emotions often creates enough wakefulness at the outset for us to notice the transition to calmness. By tolerating your restlessness, agitation, anxiety, and craving, it is possible for something to be comprehended about what keeps them going, as found in this meditator’s journal entry.
After some time I feel restless as I begin to think of all the things I want to accomplish today, especially since I return to work tomorrow after a week away. I won’t be able to get to everything, and I feel disappointed. I feel the urge to get up from my seat and leave meditation so that I can start tackling my to-do list. I have the sudden thought that this could be an “attraction to sense experience” I hear some meditators speak about. I’ve usually thought this phrase or concept indicated something grosser, like the sensual pleasures of sex or eating, or soaking in a hot tub. Now I realize that the kind of busyness I’m thinking about is pleasurable to me—a sense of accomplishment, of mastery, a kind of order or beauty. With this awareness I begin to see a light purple or lilac color slowly appear in my mind’s eye. It pulses in and out slowly, appearing at the center of its vaguely circular form, expanding outward toward some invisible rim, and then contracting back from rim to center again, in and out.
By making the connection between the kind of busyness the meditator is thinking about and sense pleasure, she has seen something about the hindrance of restlessness and its relation to other emotions. When such things are directly comprehended, the mind drops the hindrance and moves into a tranquil state. Seeing colors pulsating in meditation and following their movements and changes are an important feature of calm states for some people.
Describing Calm States
How we describe the calm states helps us become more aware of them. We really don’t have adequate language for these experiences. By describing them in more detail, we can become aware of minor things about them that we normally would not consider all that valuable.
People tend to describe visual images more readily than purely mental processes, primarily because they are more memorable. There are many people who do not see visual images or colors in their sittings and become focused on sensations, sounds, or ideas instead of images. These details may be a bit harder to remember afterward, being subtler and not necessarily what you might be accustomed to recollecting. I will often ask students if they were aware of a certain texture or tone or way of perceiving things in these states. The sitting described below is an example of someone noticing the texture of her mind (as well as visual images, types of thinking, and level of awareness).
Sinking deeper into meditation. Sinking has a familiar textural feel: thick, soft, enveloping. Loose thoughts continue, but I’m not very interested in them; they are nonsensical and flowing as I continue to sink. This culminates in an image of a cow’s face chewing hay and a lightening in the depth of the field so that I am in a more aware spot. I wonder where this image came from and I remember a conversation with a dear friend in which I stated that I was happy on farms. This cycle of sinking with loose, unconnected thoughts happens twice more (each ended in an image, but I can’t remember the images) and a lightening of the depth to a more aware spot.
These are the kinds of description that sensitize us more to the direct experience of our mind in such states. The meditator’s description of her thoughts is part of the description of the state she is in and not separate from it. So when she writes that her thoughts are loose, nonsensical, and flowing, she is recognizing how thinking functions in that particular state, even though she does not recall the content of the thoughts. If she were able to recollect the content of the thoughts, even just a word or a phrase or the theme, that would add some more detail to her experience.
Trying to intentionally recall things in these calm states can add too much pressure and be counterproductive. At a recent retreat, after listening to a student’s description of seeing a particular image in his sittings, I suggested that he focus on the details of similar images when they arise.
Unfortunately, last night Jason took me aside and told me to look for things. It upset my balance. There was a bit more effort and tightness. Some pain has come back—the tasking of it. And probably some doubt. I’ve got to stop jumping on or waiting for visual images. So silly to be tense. It spoils all the fun and clarity of it. Still see some stuff and there were times of relaxation.
We really need to have a gentle awareness of what is going on when we are in a calm space. Attempts to do things in an active and directed manner often get in the way and may snap us out of it. That is another reason why remembering what goes on in these states afterward is so helpful. By just letting ourselves be subjected to what is going on in the calm state without trying to be too awake or too directing and controlling, we get to experience it more thoroughly, more deeply. And recollecting it builds up our awareness of it. When that kind of state arises again, it is likely that we will be a bit more aware than we were before, and that awareness may lead to further discernment within the state and finer distinctions between other, similar states.
Part of what we may then become aware of is how a particular calm state has changed over time. Many times we may not really notice the change until we put it into words, as happened in the following example.
I used to call this experience “quivering,” but it now feels like a very fluid state. I have a sense of these layers that I experience being like an airplane moving through different air currents.
Describing the Order of Events
Our sense of time is not very accurate when in an extended calm space. I have often heard people remark about how short sittings seem. Most meditators find that meditating for more than an hour is not difficult when this happens, and so they can easily increase the length of their sittings. Just as these states alter our sense of how much time has passed, they can affect how we see things happening in time. They can throw off o
ur sense of a linear ordering of events.
There is a vague image of moving through pillars—very misty and floaty. There is also the sense of moving toward an opening. There is a knowing of an instant of fear, and again the whole thing vanishes. In this one, I questioned the sense of order. I almost felt as if the whole thing had happened before the visualizations and they were simply the later representations of the process.
The meditator is alluding to having experienced a different ordering of events than what her mind recalls as the linear steps in the process. She recalls (1) an image of moving through pillars, (2) moving toward an opening, (3) an instant of fear, and (4) a vanishing of the fear and everything else that was happening. But what she feels is that the fear and its vanishing happened before seeing the image of moving through pillars and toward an opening.
One of the reasons we can get confused about the order of events in such states as the one described above is that calm states can cause us to experience things in a multilinear way. This experience of multilinearity is not the same as experiencing things happening simultaneously. The difference is that there are two or more linear progressions that your mind is engaged in that don’t seem to relate to each other. They are progressing on their own steam and may not meet up. In the example above, the meditator’s mind may have been on one track of experiencing fear and on another track of moving through pillars. This kind of split between following one track of feeling and another of imagery is not uncommon. What often creates confusion is when one of the tracks stops while the other continues on. We may then, in our memory, try to condense them into one linear progression of experience, especially if we have a strong view that all of our mental experience goes in a single straight line.
The Unexpected
