In Meditation You Have Permission
by Dan Nussbaum
You have permission to do the meditation practice of your choice, or, not do it. http://skillfulmeditation.org/articles/threeconditions.html
You have permission to do the meditation practice you’ve been doing all along. You have permission to believe in it or question it or enjoy it or let it take you where it takes you. You have permission to be bored. How else will you ever get to the bottom of boredom? You have permission to try something else.
You have permission to think. You have permission to worry. You have permission to wonder if you’re doing it right.
You have permission to wonder what doing it right means. You have permission to see yourself wondering. Did you start meditation to become a good meditator? You have permission to do it wrong. But if you have permission to do it wrong, how can you do it wrong? You have permission to be bad.
You have permission to remember what it was like to be carefree. You have permission to doubt those memories. You have permission to get back to those memories whether you made them up or not. You have permission to know how you make up memories.
You have permission to go over German verbs. You have permission to think about the different grades of motor oil. You have permission to wonder, How is this meditation? You have permission to note body sensations. You have permission to do something else with body sensations. Love them. Be suspicious of them. Forbid them. Give them meaning. Question that meaning.
You have permission to have feelings. You have permission to need someone, to worry out of habit, to fear vaguely, to feel disgust, to insist on getting things your way. You have permission to let things go on. You have permission to find yourself in unexpected mind states.
You have permission to get lost. You have permission to be curious and interested. You have permission to get transfixed. You have permission to feel calm. You have permission to feel sleepy. You have permission to sleep. How else will you know about waking up if you don’t have permission to be asleep?
You have permission to know yourself in meditation. You have permission. You have permission. You have permission.
lovely. and i love your photo!
Thanks, Ellie. I’m glad you liked the post and the photo. If you click on the photo once you can see it larger and it you click twice, even larger.
Thank you for allowing me to realize I have permission.
You’re welcome, Tony.
Dan and friends, do you think most people first “trained” to adhere to a discipline from which they cannot deviate without being told to “return to the breath” or to “avoid thoughts” adjust easily or gratefully to this encouragement? Many who gravitate towards meditation and Buddhism appear to do so at least initially out of a search for comfort, stress reduction, letting go–but motivated by a goal of finding answers, seeking solace, fleeing strife, overcoming adversity. Which itself can be like the raft one clings to too long after one has traversed the stream. I wonder if the sustenance of, say, waking up by falling asleep or drifting away over the long run entices many, compared to the rituals of sitting, chanting, bowing that may delight the senses, harness the body and occupy the sitter’s mind. The approach you articulate expects maturity and responsibility, placed within the meditator, rather than looking outside to a disciplinary, inspirational, or awe-inspiring figure. That’s why I find it refreshing.
If someone hears that there’s permission to continue to do the practice that he or she has already been doing, then there isn’t a lot of adjustment being asked for. If this student kept a meditation journal and worked with a teacher who does interviews about sittings, then adjustments might come about without forcing them, when the student is ready, as she sees more into her experience of meditating. Even someone who’s committed to a certain kind of practice will make some changes if she decides the practice has been bogged down for too long.
But, as you suggest, some meditation students gravitate towards practices with rules. (Some meditation students don’t necessarily gravitate towards that kind of practice, it’s simply all they’ve ever heard of.) For someone strongly attracted to a rules-based practice or one with lots of intriguing rituals, Recollective Awareness can seem like a peculiar waste of time.
If a beginning meditation student came to me with an interest in reducing stress I would talk to the student to find out how he sees stress, how it’s affecting him, what his experiences of different kinds of stress are. He might become interested in hearing that in this approach he can address his own experience of stress rather than a more general concept of stress. Even beginning students understand the difference between practices that abstract and subdue stressful experience, those that replace one experience with another and a practice that doesn’t require opposing our experience, even the kind we don’t want very much.
I would tell a meditation student, beginning or not, that we don’t have to fight with our experience. That’s what this approach is about. That alone can reduce a lot of stress.
“We don’t have to fight with our experience.” Well said Dan… this welcome unravelling of so many years of misunderstanding…
[...] Nomon Tim Burnett discussed the 5th factor of awakening, Calm or Lightness and Ease, in the context of our 3-day sesshin closing the Winter 2013 Practice Period with Shuso Heigaku Talus Latona. He brings up a nice teaching on giving ourselves permission from the Buddhist teacher Dan Nussbaum, available here: http://somedharmathoughts.wordpress.com/2013/02/12/in-meditation-you-have-permission-2/ [...]