By Eva Gregersen
It is not without a certain sense of irony that I sit down to write a primer on meditation. You see, when I was younger, I was full of disdain for meditation, which I knew little about but associated with empty feel-good rhetoric spouted by intellectually challenged new age hippies who were blind to their own make believe and bias. I don’t believe I ever seriously asked myself why people would actually bother to do something as seemingly pointless as sit down and do nothing for hours on end.
It wasn’t until my mid-20s that it occurred to me that there might be something to meditation after all. The impetus was the coincidence of having two people in my life who independently of one another seemed to have developed into better versions of themselves compared to just a couple of years earlier. Both impressed me as having become wiser, calmer, more capable, more robust, and more caring. In short, better company. I expressed my awe to them, and to my perplexity each one credited their meditation practice. Now, if I had had this experience with just one person, I probably would not have put much stock in such an answer, figuring people are wont to attribute causality to arbitrary factors they just happen to feel good about. But when two people I knew – two very different people – had undergone the same positive transformation and attributed it to the same seemingly useless practice, I had to admit that I might have been too hasty in dismissing meditation. I resolved to try it out with an open mind.
At first I set out to meditate on my own. However, I struggled with getting it done, in part because I was preoccupied by doubts as to whether I was doing it right and in part because I could not summon the motivation to make myself do something that I was still highly unsure about. And so I opted to try meditating with others.
The two people I knew practiced very different forms of meditation – you could say that they were in fact on each extreme of the Buddhist spectrum. One practiced in the Zen Buddhism, which is a minimalist form of Buddhism that distills the act of meditating to its most basic elements and which can pretty much be summed up as “shut up and just sit.” The other practiced in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, which features all the trappings of a “real” religion, including much more elaborate rituals and a beliefs. As an atheist and a scientifically minded skeptic, it was a no-brainer for me to go with Zen.
The group I joined practiced Zen meditation one evening a week for two hours and 20 minutes at a time. For my first time I was told to show up 15 minutes early and was given a quick instruction, mostly about how to sit in terms of leg positioning and back posture (the shutting up part was implied). Then people took to their places, a bell was rung to indicate the beginning of the meditation, and suddenly I was stuck sitting silent and motionless on a pillow in a room full of people doing the same for what seemed like an eternity (and in fact two hours and 20 minutes is quite a long time – as I’ve found out since then, many Zen groups do much shorter sessions). I still wasn’t sure whether I was doing it right, but it would have been an embarrassing failure to stand up and walk out, and so quitting was out of the question.
Resigning myself to my fate, I tried to concentrate on my breath as I had been told to do, but my mind kept wandering. At this point my primary goal was to get through the session without making any movement or noise, since I had received a stern warning that fidgeting or sighing or otherwise proving a distraction would result in frowns and bitchy reactions. So I did not beat myself up for not being able to sustain my concentration on my breath, since I was mostly worried about triggering adverse reactions from the others. Whenever I noticed that my mind had wandered and that I was now focusing my attention, not on the ins and outs of my breathing, but on my plans for that weekend – or the noises coming from outside – or the groceries I had to remember to buy on my way home – or what was up with that dream I had last week – I simply redirected my attention to my breath, again and again, ad infinitum as the time passed. I didn’t know it then, but I was actually doing it right.
Finally the bell rang again to signify the end of the meditation. People started stretching their legs and putting their meditation cushions back where they found them. Green tea was served to those who wanted a cup of tea and a half hour’s informal conversation with the other Zen practitioners before leaving. Once out on the street my friend noted with approval that I had sat perfectly still and asked me, ‘So how do you feel?’ I replied, ‘Like I’ve been sitting still on a pillow for a couple of hours. Am I supposed to feel something different now?’ He laughed and said, ‘No, that’s how it is.’
In the hours and days afterwards it was a little anticlimactic to note absolutely no difference in how I felt. However, I had gone into it with the understanding that a significant investment of time would be required before any results could be expected and so I showed up again the next week and continued to show up every week after that. I held off on evaluating whether it “was working” and simply made the weekly ordeal part of my routine. It helped to recall that some years earlier, where I had gone from couch potato to fit through a similar process of faith that hard work now would yield results at a later time. I also had learned that there is a considerable body of scientific studies showing that meditation changes the brain and brings a variety of benefits, which, again as a scientifically-minded person, bolstered my resolve. I focused on getting through each session and finding out more about the practice, both through talking with the other Zen practitioners and through reading a couple of the books they recommended.
The modern Zen literature is extensive and ranges from hyper-specific instruction manuals that devote dozens of pages to proper spinal positioning and breathing technique to the gonzo narrative that is Hardcore Zen by Brad Warner. My friend recommended the latter title, and since my curiosity was piqued by the incongruous image of a punkish and pop-culture-referencing Zen master, it was among the first batch of books I picked up. That book is a real trip. At once pulsating and ethereal, Hardcore Zen serves up the lessons of Buddhism with a restlessness and rebelliousness that allow its message to work its way into your unconscious. The irreverence that is so characteristic of Zen Buddhism is described in most books (usually by relating how some Zen master shocked a student with his seemingly infantile, violent, or nonsensical antics), but ‘Hardcore Zen’ communicates it directly to the reader by showing rather than telling. It makes for a vividly effective wake-up call. It gave me my first non-intellectual inkling of the insights meditation can bring, and as a companion to early practice I would definitely recommend it.
As the weeks progressed, my practice improved in several ways. I started using the technique of counting my breaths (inhaling on 1, 3, 5… and exhaling on 2, 4, 6… and starting over after 10) which is a good way for beginners to keep track of just how often their mind wanders. Initially I hadn’t understood why such a big deal was made about proper posture, but since a big deal was made about it I did my best to sit up unnaturally straight. (One thing that happened was that the meditation teacher held a long stick (kyosaku) against my back to give me a sense of how much farther back I was supposed to hold my shoulders. And so I did.)
What I found was not only that I could breathe deeper when my spine was stick-straight, but also that the longer I sat the clearer my mind would become. One of the other practitioners in the group shared with me that she would wait as long as she could after each exhalation before inhaling again, which was another tip I found helpful in sharpening my focus. Gradually I gained a new awareness of the interplay between body and mind, and how wrong Descartes had been about his mind-body dualism.
I was so successful at focusing on the process that the first results snuck up on me. Two or three months after I started spending my Wednesday evenings sitting and doing nothing in a big room downtown with my friend and his fellow Zen practitioners, I was talking with that same friend and we broached the topic of a matter in my personal life which had troubled me for a long time and which he had heard me rehash many times in the past while making little progress. But this time something was different. What had seemed complex to me before was suddenly simple. Obstacles I had previously deemed insurmountable I now saw as manageable, and the way to proceed was not only clear to me but loaded with urgency. I did not need or want to vent at length; I was ready to act. My friend remarked on the difference, and I went, ‘Huh, that’s true. I don’t know why, but yeah, it just seems easier now.’ I learned that this is one of the common and classical effects of effective meditation.
So here’s what I would say: Just commit. Take a leap of faith and keep at it without worrying about how it’s going. Focus wholeheartedly on the process. Just as how the moment you stop caring about getting girls is the moment girls start wanting to date you, ignoring the results is the quickest way to get results. Ignoring the results because that is the quickest way to get results is the mindset that I recommend. It may seem paradoxical, but there are a lot of paradoxes in meditation.