Path Reflections #1: Starting Mindset
For the approaching beginner, the initial investigatory steps into pursuing a meditation practice can feel overwhelming and anxiety-inducing, ironically provoking the exact emotions it seems intended to alleviate.
Meditation feels so boundless and open-ended that it is easy to become intimidated by the different types, different lineages or belief systems, the degree of spirituality or religiosity involved, the duration of the sit. For one who “just wants to meditate”, there arises the fear of “doing it wrong”, of practicing the “wrong system”, and thus many simply want an exact prescription, a personal spiritual trainer to tell them precisely what to do, how to do it, when to do it, and how long to do it for.
I believe this is reflective of a general impatience, a recognition that time is scarce, and is akin to the same feeling of unwelcome complexity that one who just wants clean teeth feels when presented with forty five options for toothpaste.
I call it “rushing to the effect”, which is another way of saying that the practice tends to be regarded as an expedient to the goal - if there was an easier way, everyone would do that, but since easier ways are only bandaids, here we are, and let’s just get it over with already so I can “get better”.
Very much generalizing here, but Westerners tend to grope towards optimization & efficiency, and the allure of finding the perfect and optimal thing for one right now and not ‘wasting time’ trialing several styles before settling in is anathema and irksome in its own right, and the paralyzing indecision it creates can be enough to ensure that one’s intent to practice never leads to any actual practice.
This tends to be all the more true when the goal is to correct or assuage something that one has exhausted other potential options for - those who find religion not by virtue of being drawn to it, but because they have nowhere left to turn. And when people resign themselves to the option of last resort, typically the last thing they want is to be met with more questions. Just give me the cure.
Start Here
The reality is that people approach meditation practice from countless subjective starting points and goals - as many as there are practitioners - and that it can take some trial and exploration with different systems to determine which is the right fit for you at the moment. It is likewise true that long-time meditators have typically explored and switched amongst a variety of disciplines.
Thus, there is no “wrong” place to begin, and so pick one common starting point - Metta or Samatha are very good entryways - fight the urge to overthink it, and just begin. Any starting point will help build the foundational elements of the practice in terms of committing time, learning to sit still for longer periods of time, and turning it into a habit. From there, just learn to rely on your intuition as a guide for deciding if it feels right or if you want to explore a different discipline1.
Finding a local meditation meetup group is another good way to immerse ones; they will be happy to provide pointers for the beginning practitioner. Remember, many millions of people have grappled with the same questions as you are right now, and thus there are no shortages of resources to learn from.
The indecisiveness is an important element to keep in mind however, and I will argue over the course of this short article that this tendency to overthink decisions like this is exactly what beginning a meditation practice will help you avoid, and so again - and more emphatically: just. start. Somewhere.
But without getting too far ahead, the next major stumbling block for people is typically the time commitment, specifically the question of “how long?” and the reaction of “geez… that’s a long time… will this be worth it?”
The tendency towards optimizing vis a vis finding the magic bullet of “optimal sit duration”2 again rears its head here, and will likewise yield as many guesstimates and (logical-sounding but weakly unsupported) explanations as there are opinions in the world.
I don’t know what the answer is, and suspect that different a) levels of focus, b) meditation types, and c) personal practice goals, are all factors, and don’t know that there is a single universal that would apply despite what some may claim.
It is generally acknowledged that beginners should build up their practice slowly, starting with short five or ten minute sits, and then working up to longer durations. “Longer durations” could of course mean anything from 30 minutes to all day.
At present, I try for one hour in the morning, and one hour in the evening, typically of different types of meditation (e.g. one hour of Metta, one of Samatha), and then mix it up periodically to explore the effects and to practice different types of disciplines. This could conceivably change in the future, but it is where I am after approximately a year, so let’s run with that. An hour is also what Jeffrey Martin’s Finders Course suggests is “ideal”, though I will add that, if you don’t have a full hour, and particularly in the beginning, some is always better than none.
Nonetheless, a very immediate problem arises in that most people do not just have two spare hours lying around to devote to sitting silently listening to their breath and ignoring the growing pain in their knees.
Growth Mindset
It is precisely from the standpoint of these “problems” of option paralysis, impatience, and time commitment that I want to suggest a particular alternative framing or mindset that one standing at the precipice of their practice, can engage to put the question/problem into perspective.
First, we acknowledge that this advice is geared to the cohort of the hesitant who are approaching the path from what we may again call the “western life track perspective.” This is not necessarily a wrong perspective, but its associated value system is very generally speaking, characterized by a predominantly secular, and rooted in individual expression through an inexhaustible cycle of material attainment & consumption, and generates many seekers of relief from the well-documented resulting anxieties that arise from a life too fully steeped in it.
This viewpoint also tends to cast decisions according to some very particular and reflexively-applied criteria, which are indeed not at all irrational, but as we will see, it can be helpful to look at the precise context within which the being weighing the question according to this criteria is rooted, and ask whether that being will always make judgments according to that criteria or be rooted in that context. Confused? Please, permit me to explain.
Different Currencies
The fact that the time commitment feels significant is itself significant. It is true that, from this starting point, finding two hours does seem like a lot. Looking up from the bottom of the peak, there are the natural practical questions of cost vs benefit, including: is it worth it, what if it doesn’t work, and I’ve invested (i.e. wasted) all of this time but am no better off? What am I being asked to give up in my life? Consider the following:
The idea that the reflexive questions posed above are those that frame the endeavor in terms of an “investment” which must be valued, quantified, etc, and show some positive ‘return’.
Similarly, the matter of “finding time” to incorporate serious meditation into your already booked-solid day from the standpoint of “what must I sacrifice” to make time for meditation is another way of saying, not just “what will this practice cost”, but “what will this practice cost me”?
That is, I must obtain a benefit whose value is greater than the effort I put in.
The presence of either or both of these considerations is itself powerfully suggestive that one could benefit greatly from a meditation practice.
What are these activities that are on the table though, and who is this “self” who is agonizing over what activity to pre-empt in order to make room for this uncertain trial of meditation?
The current version of you that is having trouble deciding values, for instance, some Netflix show(s), or video games or happy hour or exercise or reading over an hour or two of meditation (don’t try to carve it out of sleep time).
This is because these activities are already considered to be congealed around or highly constitutive of the self / identity, which is part of the process of attaching to or associating that identity with the subjective cravings for the pleasures that are valued by that self. Being a self, it regards the diminishing or rejection of its constitutive elements as something of a threat, or at the very least inconsistent with the years or even decades of patterned reinforcement these behaviors are rooted in. And of course, this current self is one that is not already a meditator, has no real idea how to value a meditation practice compared to the present suite of activities that define.
Now we could say the same about any activity, but I suggest that, especially in this case, the “which two-hours dilemma” is a false one. For we are not talking about two hours, but one’s entire being.
Self-Destructive Practice
Consider that you are not battling to find two hours of time to reshuffle around in a day in which the remaining 22 hours will remain the same. You are instead undertaking something much more drastic and subversive: what you are really doing is chiseling a crack into your currently existing value framework into which you will then jam several sticks of dynamite, the effect of which will be to completely demolish the entire structure that considers finding two hours of time to devote to mediation an “issue” in the first place.
This may sound like a decidedly un-calm and violent metaphor to invoke in a strategy for embracing a meditation practice, but it is also quite true - the effects are profoundly transformative [though our metaphor is perhaps a little extreme in that the changes are gradual rather than instantaneous] . Pursued to any degree beyond superficial calming & relaxation, this practice will fundamentally change you, your sense of self, and how you navigate through the world. It is important to know exactly what you are getting into - or out of - here.
Accounting Loophole
The effect we use to our advantage here is that, along with the current value system, likewise the entire current iteration of the self that ‘future you’ is borrowing from will cease to exist as a result of pursuing the very practice they are underwriting, and this is entirely the goal - to get rid of this version of the person. In short, what you are actually sacrificing is the sacrificer.
Posed that way, it almost sounds like some vaguely immoral accounting loophole that says there is no cost to pursuing this practice because the lender we borrow from today, will not only not be around to collect the debt, but also the value of what is borrowed will disappear along with the lender.
While hopefully I should haven’t to clarify that I never advocate taking advantage of people in such a way, when it is your own current, stubborn, flaw-ridden self that is reluctant to pursue a meditation practice, then this alternate framing has some utility in that it should help us - though it requires some amount of faith - understand the highly contextual & illusory value with which we cling to that which we do not want to sacrifice in order to start meditating.
The practice is ultimately about removing obstacles to your life, and part of this entails the recognition that you are both the obstacle and the means of removing it. This of course does not mean making life completely free of obstacles as such, but seeing through the illusions and attachments that impede and distort understanding the nature of the self & reality.
With proper work and dedication, you will become a fundamentally different being, one who regards meditative practice very differently from the version of that being who is now trying to figure out just what could possibly be worth "sacrificing" in order to try this experiment.
Whatever activity is chosen to be replaced by a practice from a scheduling standpoint, it will in time be revealed to be trivial, as its current valuation is rooted in an entirely different way of looking at the world, at the self, and as such is valued in an entirely different currency. The version of the being that has done a year of practice will not only not miss these things, but will look back on them with a sense of absurdity in thinking they ever seemed to possess any weight or value whatsoever.
Moreover, we learn that it is not just certain activities that are thus revalued, but entire modes of thought and habitual patterns of behavior, which we took for granted or never fully appreciated how much power they held over our lives in terms of how they shaped our behavior - our options - that are unearthed, investigated, analyzed, and replaced by a fuller understanding.
This will in turn reveal that the ‘individual’ we conceived of ourselves as was not, in actuality, deciding what things to sacrifice, but the activities or things were ransoming the individual. Part of the investigatory or unraveling process is coming to understand how little agency we actually exercise in our lives - the inertia of habit feels like the exercise of internal preference, but it is much more directing than directed than we like to acknowledge.
So while we may think we are taking two hours to redecorate a single room in a house that otherwise remains fundamentally the same house; but in reality this two hour block is actually a means of remodeling the entire house, and thus any two-hour block can be the basis for staging that change.
Were they still around to evaluate it in terms of value, your optimization / payoff-obsessed self would call it quite a bargain; perhaps the best use of two hours ever devised.
Grinding Down vs Demolishing the Base
So this is what it means to take aim at the base versus grinding from the top down. While doing the meditations over time will yield the same ultimate effect - if you stick with it - if you can approach the decision to try a meditation practice from this mindset, you can actually begin acting in a sense as if the structure has already been exploded, as if the heavy lifting has already been done - part of what makes meditation difficult for beginners is the uncertainty, and the uncertainty is rooted in reluctance to change.
It is acknowledged that no small degree of faith is a requisite here, and I say “in a sense”, as one still must do the work around which the new value structure can cohere, but in lightening the burden of uncertainty through “pre-adopting” the mindset of profound personal transformation serve to hasten the pace of progress, and can actually give one a healthier, more confident & patient sense of “rushing toward”3 versus the hesitant sense of “venturing out from”.
Make no mistake, this is no magic bullet, just one tool to ease the uncertainty of initial commitment. Like well-placed hacks of an ax, you still may need to take many swings, but you don’t cut through the entire tree; fewer well-aimed blows will use its own weight against it.
Though do make an attempt to stick with your starting point for a while, practicing it as instructed, and not mixing together different styles and disciplines, particularly at first. If you stick with it, you will notice results.
Let us pause also and acknowledge that intention is everything, and assigning an “optimal time duration” is perhaps very much an artifact in itself of modern science coming around to a practice that has shown to be beneficial for thousands of years. If meditation is a good and beneficial thing in your life, don’t not do it because you “only” have 35 minutes and not a full hour to spare.
Nonetheless, do not get cocky or find yourself start attaching to progress or attainment of practice discipline, which of course, is very antithetical to the practice.