In addition to time, place, posture, and preparation (see the previous article for these topics), what is the most important consideration before diving into your practice? Why do so many people give up their practice? Can you guess what it is? It isn’t lack of time or money. It isn’t even lack of aptitude or attainment. The main reason for most people to give up on their meditation is attitude. Beginning your meditation practice with the correct attitude is essential. It is what will see you through any difficult, confusing, or simply monotonous period of practice. The best attitude for meditation is one of curiosity, patience, resolve, and incredulity.
Curiosity
One of the biggest stumbling blocks for meditators is boredom. Everyone’s threshold of boredom is different, but by the end of a year of daily practice, we are sure to have encountered boredom at least once. We are doing the same simple and repetitive thing every day; we are listening to our breath, chanting the same syllable, or visualizing the same image day in and day out. One might even think that meditation practice is the technique of deliberately seeking out boredom. We in the modern world are very susceptible to boredom and we have many things we turn to from cigarettes or alcohol to smartphones and computer games when we get the slightest feeling of boredom. The antidote to boredom in meditation, however, is curiosity.
If we are getting bored because we are noticing the same thoughts, emotions, and sensations every time, then we know our attitude of curiosity could use some refinement. If we are not noticing any differences in our experience in meditation, it is because our curiosity has become numb. If we are paying attention to our breath for example, each cycle of inhalation and exhalation is always slightly different from the previous whether we notice it or not. A strong attitude of curiosity will help us to notice those differences.
Curiosity that is both sensitive and process oriented. We want to be careful that our curiosity is not searching for an answer or some resolution to a problem. That brand of curiosity will soon become frustrated at the lack of satisfaction. Have you ever known someone who really enjoys going fishing? Some of these people are satisfied or even happy even when they return without having caught any fish. These people delight in the process irrespective of any results. There is no end to the road of meditation. We are not searching for a goal or a thing. The type of curiosity that is helpful is one that delights in noticing differences however slight. The attitude of curiosity that does not judge better or worse, but finds each step on the path fascinating is the kind of curiosity that will be a quite valuable companion on our journey.
Patience
Meditation asks us for a very particular kind of patience. We often think of patience as waiting for some result or reward. This is not the brand of patience that will help. In meditation we are not waiting for something to happen or for ourselves to change. There is not final destination or accomplishment to be had in meditation. It took me a long time to really understand that. There are two kinds of patience that are helpful: the patience we have with a misbehaving child or a mischievous pet and the patience we have when we exercise or clean a house.
Have you ever heard the phrase, monkey mind? The mind is often compared to a crazy monkey. It is not something we can lock up or even truly tame. We can befriend the mind and come to some amicable agreements, but mind is always there. When I say that mind is there, I do not mean it is there as a thing or an object. I’ve come to understand it as more of a process than an entity, but the process is always running on some level from silent to very intrusive. When we meditate we will notice that the mind will very often start to gear up and try to pull our attention. This is not what we want. Having patience for the mind and its antics in meditation is going to be one of our best tools for our practice. The more we struggle and fight against the mind, the more powerful it becomes. Mind feeds on our attention to it. The more we are able to let it dance itself out without jumping into the dance and without feeding it with resistance, the quicker it will tire itself and sit down to rest. The patience to wait it out is crucial to meditation.
Meditation, like exercising to maintain our health or even cleaning house, also requires patience because the task is never done. We clean the house and say we have done our chores, but it is really never a completed task. The moment we stop cleaning anything, it begins to get dirty again. In a similar way, we may feel like we have achieved the results we want from exercise; we may like how we look in the mirror or be able to fit into our skinny clothes; however, if we do not continue exercising, we will realize the results were fleeting. My grandmother used to warn me against exercise, saying that if you start and don’t keep it up, all of your muscle will turn to fat. She scared me with that pronouncement when I was a child. I now realize that the patience to continue doing something without end is not merely a virtue. It is also the way to live a healthy life. Developing this kind of patience with your meditation practice will serve you well.
Resolve
There will always be things that will interfere with a long-term meditation practice. Developing the resolve to maintain the practice is necessary. It may be cliché, but life happens. Have you ever tried to keep a diary, or decided to go jogging every morning, or even promised yourself you’d read a book a week or one a month? You started off with great intentions, but then something came up that put a pause on your activity. You promised yourself that you would get back to it when you found the time. A week passed, then a month, and then you might even have forgotten the promise that you had made yourself or why you had stopped in the first place.
I’ve made and broken resolutions as often as most people. It’s normal and perhaps even beneficial. Trying things and letting them go is one way to develop. Giving some resolutions a second, third, or fourth go is also good for our development. There will be times when you will have to adjust your meditation schedule in order to accommodate other things in your life for a time. There may be times when you find that meditation is causing more stress than it seems to be alieving. You may even face physical challenges that make your normal practice difficult or impossible. There have been times when I’ve been too sick to meditate. There have been times when I’ve been in too much pain to be able to do my normal meditation practice as well. Having the resolve to accommodate changes in life or even to return to your practice after taking a short break from it is very useful.
There may also be times when your trust in yourself or the process gets shaky or disappears. I have faced the erroneous belief that my meditation was getting me nowhere. There was a part of my mind that knew I should not trust that belief, but it was still very strong. Being able to lean on resolve helped me to continue through my insecurity. People such as Saint John of the Cross who wrote Dark Night of the Soul in the 1500s describes the kind of resolve to continue going on the spiritual journey, even when the the guiding light seems to have been snuffed or when the process has become bland, tasteless.
Incredulity
This may seem like an odd attitude to add to the list, but it is just as important as the others. You may not need it, but it is good to be prepared with incredulity just in case. Many people who meditate encounter some experiences at some time during their practices. For some they happen very early in their practices but they can pop up at any time. The kind of experience I am describing could be a vision or a kind of waking dream. It might me a feeling of breaking through into a new, more expansive space in awareness. It could be an auditory experience of someone calling your name or speaking to you. It might be an overwhelming feeling of joy or love. It may even be a sense that you have shed all attachment to self or to this physical world, that you have seen through the veil of this world to the spiritual reality behind. Any one of these experiences could be inspiring and may even give the experiencer a sense of spiritual accomplishment, of achievement. Being able to face these experiences with incredulity is crucial. Mind will very often create these experiences for us to either feed the spiritual ego and make us feel special or out of sheer boredom. If we get too interested in these experiences or even expectant of them happening over again, we will easily get bored and frustrated when they become elusive or stop altogether. If we can look at them with incredulity and maintain our curiosity, we can see through the experiences to what they are. This does not mean that the feelings or insights we receive are false, but rather that they are not as otherworldly as we make them out to be, and that they do not make us any more special than we have been since the beginning of time. The experience is an experience, and that is all. We may understand that the special joy that we feel is not because we have gained something, but have finally stopped doing things to resist it, and that the reason we noticed it so strongly is because we have finally allowed ourselves to.
We are all magnificent beings of Love, Joy, Wellbeing, and Awareness. Our meditation practice is to enlighten us to the truth of our being. Having the curiosity, patience, resolve, and incredulity to shed all of the resistance that conceals our true Selves is a blessing, and if any or all of these attitudes are weak or missing, we can develop them for ourselves. This is the path of meditation.
