Chapter 1: Conscious Meditation

Since the arrival of Zen Buddhism in the West during the 20th century, and particularly with its spread through post-war America beginning in the 1950′s, meditation has had a strange and ambivalent appeal. It has been reviled, adored, ridiculed, admired, studied, and perhaps most of all, wrapped in a fog of esoteric weirdness. It has been a bizarre fate for a bodily process that is as natural and as necessary as defecation or sex.

If you happen to doubt that last statement, spend some time in Nature (or, if you’re a city dweller, watch your dog or cat). Every living thing spends time in quiescence, in a withdrawal from activity that is not sleep or even an unconscious or semi-conscious state. In the natural meditative process, there is awareness — an undistracted state of attention to only what is there; a calm and centered focus; a clear concentration of resting alertness in which mind and body are one.

How this simple act became an arcane process in which the body is tormented while the mind chases spirits and pursues enlightenment like a politician hunting for cash or votes is perhaps one of the defining marks of human ego. In my personal library, I have perhaps two or three dozen books devoted, in part or whole, to teaching meditation. A few of them actually have some useful and workable instruction; most of them are written by respected teachers and writers in the field — people who no doubt can and do meditate, and are able to speak persuasively of the benefits of whatever practice they recommend.

I haven’t picked up any of those books in years, for I have reached the conclusion that you cannot teach meditation. The best a teacher of meditation can do is to teach people how to unlearn meditation. No one had to teach you how to breathe or how to have an orgasm — you figured those out fairly well for yourself. In fact, I am betting that the more you did learn about these bodily practices, the more confused and less confident you became in your ability to do them. I am now asking you to unlearn everything you’ve ever been taught or heard about meditation. There is a particular way to go about this that I have found effective in both my personal practice and in the experiences of my clients in counseling. I’ll present that to you now — the following is an article I wrote a few years back that has become a sort of “assignment piece” for beginners in meditation. It works well for those who are experienced in other practices as well.

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It has become a pet peeve of mine that meditation should be arduous, difficult, involve long hours twisted up into a painful posture, or that it should lead to some elevated and pristine state of spiritual enlightenment (after, of course, a long period of struggle, confusion, and expense, usually at the hands of a self-appointed “master”). This is the kind of nonsense that keeps people away from a perfectly natural, relatively effortless, and completely healthful form of inner practice.

Meditation is the natural and restorative activity of all life: observe how animals, plants, and even some people are able to slow down outer movement, settle into a state of relaxed but aware silence, and simply absorb the regenerative energy of their environment and its living, responsive consciousness. In the ongoing meditative activity of Nature, there is no thought of complexity, struggle, difficulty, or attainment: there is only the practice itself, and the often visible well-being that arises from the quiet openness of one being toward the bountiful energy of the universe. This is how we are meant to meditate; it is nothing special, and in no way should it be a hardship or strain. Indeed, if there is difficulty, then it is not meditation (obviously, we can be conscious of difficulty during meditation—we are, after all, not meant to stop thinking or feeling during our practice, because this is impossible; however, to build difficulty into the meditative act itself is simply a distortion of Nature).

So we must, it seems, begin our practice of meditation with an act of inner separation from ego’s distortions and its self-images. We must say an inner No to the idea that meditation is a difficult process that can only be engaged by our “higher” or spiritual nature, at the expense and often the abasement of our “lower” or bodily nature. This act of consciously expelling such false ideas will become our first meditation.

1. Find a quiet place to sit or lie down. Go with what feels comfortable and settling to your own inner sense. You don’t need a cushion, altar, icon, incense, or any special environmental trappings, unless any of these feel natural and comfortable to you: all you really need is a quiet place where you can be present to your self and the moment, with little or no distraction.

2. Get into a comfortable position where you can be relatively still for a few minutes. Listen to your body: let it tell you what position allows you to settle down and open to your inner life. There are no special rules: you do not have to keep your back ramrod-straight and stiff, you do not need to cross or twist up your limbs, and you do not have to lock your hands into a “mudra” or make any special noises to place your body into the optimal state for receiving cosmic energy. Just find a position in which you are comfortable and still aware.

3. Take a few simple breaths in awareness of your own body. Again, there is no need to breathe in a particular way (deeply, shallowly, forcefully, or anything else): just be aware of what happens within when you breathe. At the beginning, it is best to gently close your eyes for the meditation; this may be adjusted or varied in later sessions.

4. Now simply ask for help, with no concern for its source or how it might come, in your effort to discard certain false ideas about meditation. Once again, let your body ask for this help: perhaps your request will center around the area of your heart, perhaps it will come from the back of your head or neck, or maybe you will feel it most in your stomach. Let your body — your plain, animal being — take the lead in requesting this help; because after all, the transformative energy received in response to our inner No will come through our bodily cells.

5. Repeat a sentence or a set of phrases that seems to best capture or summarize the mistaken ideas about meditation that you have received. Let’s say you choose the sentence ”meditation must lead to spiritual enlightenment, and to do so it must be painful and arduous.” Say it to yourself (or even write it down), and prepare to expel it.

6. Now say an inner No, three times, to the phrase. Let your entire being, body and psyche, say “No, No, No, to (the idea that meditation must lead to spiritual enlightenment, and to do so it must be painful and arduous).” Some people actually feel the phrase being eliminated from their heart, abdomen, brain, or other organ or body system; others just sense a kind of inner relief, a lightening of their load. It’s most effective to do this with humor and with familiar, non-esoteric images: for example, if you work with computers a lot, you can see the phrase on a screen, highlight it, and hit the “delete” key. The main requirement is whatever works best for you.

7. Finally, once you feel that the inner No has been completed, say “thank you,” perhaps with no particular idea of who or what you’re thanking. Both research and experience show that gratitude is a very healthy habit for both mind and body. Then you may continue to meditate, or simply get up and carry on with daily living.

If you have never meditated before (or never thought you had, or could meditate), and you have tried this little seven-step practice, then congratulations—you’ve just practiced your “first meditation.” It may have taken all of three, five, or ten minutes—the time does not matter. What matters is each experience, and your feelings of each experience. If you are new to meditation, try this simple practice each day for about a week (this ensures that the benefits of the inner No are enduringly realized), and then you can work on deepening your experience with meditation.

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The idea behind this practice is to remove from your mental program any preconceived ideas about meditation. Once again, it is not special, not difficult, not painful, and not an altered state of consciousness. Meditation is consciousness. If you think you have to reach another plane of being to be successful at meditating, then you are chasing an illusion. Meditation is a celebration of consciousness, a dance of awareness. If someone tells you that you have to turn off your mind when you meditate, ask him where you can find the switch.

After you have tried the simple meditation described above, you have laid the groundwork for practicing the art of inner elimination. The point is that what I call “conscious meditation” is really a deep cleaning of the mind that follows no script or instructional manual. There will be moments in your practice when you have a goal, and times when you don’t. There will be sessions in which you work consciously and even forcefully with certain specific ideas, beliefs, or emotions; and times when there is only silence and presence. There will be periods where thought leads, and others where everything around and within you is sensed or felt. There will be moments when you feel like you’re getting somewhere and others when your mind is the proverbial kitten chasing its tail. It is all, equally, meditation, a celebration of your unique consciousness.