Five Things About Meditation – Dialectic Two Step

Estimated reading time: 11 minute(s)

Five Things About Meditation

Here are a few questions I get about meditation.

1. How does meditation improve your life?

The answer comes from doing it. So let’s try it.

Wherever you are, let your eyes relax. Keep them open enough to read this, but otherwise, let them be.
Notice what’s going on within your body. Do this by letting your awareness fill your body, like air filling a balloon.
You should feel an increased sensitivity to what’s going on inside and around you. Let that sensitivity gradually increase with each breath.
Let your awareness sink and settle into your lower abdomen. As it sinks, allow the body to relax more and more.
Once your awareness has centered on your belly and your body relaxes, gently notice your breath rise and fall.
Follow the breath for a count of 10 or 20 and then open your eyes fully, and bring some movement into your body.

How do you feel? Relaxed, a little more at ease?

This is the first glimpse of what meditation can offer. Meditation gives you access to peace of mind, to a more vivid sensation of how you’re actually feeling, and subsequently deeper insight into what makes you tick. These insights give you valuable information that you can act on to improve your life and your relationships.

2. What is the goal of meditation?

There are a lot of answers to this question.  The first thing you should understand is that meditation does not produce enlightenment.

Everything you experience in meditation is temporary. You’ll notice that before meditation you’re often a jumble of tension. During meditation you can feel pleasure, pain, peace, or frustration. Afterwards you may find you’re more at ease or at least feeling different from when you started. Enlightenment, in contrast, is not a temporary experience. It is not something that we produce by doing something special.

The Buddha talked about two main aspects of meditation – Vipassana and Samatha. Vipassana is insight into being and the causes of suffering. Samatha is tranquility. Strictly speaking, there is no goal to meditation, it is simply being. But the insights and tranquility that come are certainly benefits.

3. Is the goal of meditation to stop your thoughts?

I think there may be only one way to stop your thoughts. Whatever produces the thoughts must stop. Only death could accomplish that.

Meditation involves no such thing. In fact it provides the opportunity to develop a healthier relationship with your thoughts. You’ll learn that they will rise and fall, often without rhyme or reason. Seeing their ephemeral nature gives you reason to re-evaluate how to approach them. Meditation inspires you to discipline the mind; to be choosy about which thoughts illicit action.

4. How do I deal with my thoughts?

There are two things that will come to your attention when you begin meditating; your body and your thoughts.

Some of the insights to be gained from meditation come from wrestling with our thoughts. It begins with shifting our relationship to them. Rather than assuming the role of director of your thoughts or being driven by them, we establish a non-judgmental awareness of them. We just sit with them for a while. With time they become friends whose advice we sometimes heed and sometimes ignore.

5. How do I deal with the body?

The body is a very practical teacher. It will take your attention ruthlessly. With aches and pains, itches, and tickles in your throat. I’ve found its insights instructive. The aches and pains remind us of what the Buddha pointed out. There are causes of suffering and cessation of suffering.

Pain is very direct. It begs you to find its cause and alleviate it. It invites you to explore it, discover its source. A good example is simply noticing that your posture is poor. This is the cause of our back pain. When we don’t interfere with the process of being, we will adjust our posture and stop suffering.  There is the Buddha’s teaching in a nutshell.

If we sit with the sensations, we discover they are like our thoughts. They are temporary, but instructive. We can listen to them, or we can get caught up in adoration or aversion of them. Meditation is listening and being with our perceptions, like a good partner in a relationship. The partnership can be rewarding if we are attentive and hold up our end of the bargain.

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Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two. - Octavio

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