Why Do You Meditate?
by Dan Nussbaum
If someone asks me about the purpose of meditation, I usually toss the question back. I’ll ask, Why do you meditate? Or, Why do you want to start?
I’m not being cagey. It’s almost a certainty that the questioner already has ideas about what meditation can do for her; I’m interested in hearing what they are. Still, not unreasonably she’d like me to say something. Isn’t a meditation teacher supposed to extol the promises of practice? She wants support for her goals or she may want me to suggest a couple. Or maybe she’s simply curious.
Since I think it’s important for meditation students to hear themselves say what they believe meditation is about, I listen. This gets at something crucial to the Recollective Awareness approach:
The experience that people have of meditation can’t be isolated from what they’ve picked up about meditation. That doesn’t mean that there’s a pure state of influence-free meditation that we’re supposed to reach. It’s like marriage, which can’t be isolated from a lifetime of hearing about marriage. The notion that says meditation depends on clearing the mind can be as consequential for meditators as the pronouncement “for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health” usually is for husbands and wives.
If someone takes up the idea that meditation will lead to a feeling of oneness, then deliberately or not, he will be doing a “oneness practice.” The influence his belief exerts can be hard to pin down. He might not realize what’s been going on until he looks into a persistent feeling of disappointment he has when he sits.
People receive so many messages about meditation’s benefits that the process of Unlearning Meditation that Jason Siff describes can profitably be entered into even by people with little or no history of meditating. Which should go in your “strange but true” folder.
When I see every day that my mindfulness newsfeed has many new stories added, and that those stories trigger proliferating tweets, retweets, blog posts, Facebook comments, TV news stories and radio segments, then the reticence of a Recollective Awareness teacher to contribute more fodder to a meditation student’s imagination probably doesn’t make much difference. The strength of the ongoing mindfulness wave in psychology and medicine means the dominant message about meditation today has to do with its health benefits. The results of a PubMed search impress the reader not just because of the outcomes they categorize – PubMed can seem like contemporary Abhidhamma- but because the amount of studies is numberless. Almost.
Can meditation help insomnia? There’s research. Low back pain? Yes, in a small group of elderly subjects. Depression? What kind you got? Worry? It works. Anxiety? It helps. Fibromyalgia? Maybe a little. General well-being? Certainly. Prison recidivism? There’s evidence. Mood in a cohort of post-surgical cancer patients? Yes. Classroom attention? Yes. Motivation? Yes. Social anxiety? Yes.
Without talking right now about the often unchallenged status of peer review studies in our culture, I’d like to call attention to another way of looking at meditation that gets overwhelmed sometimes by data, tables and charts. It’s an orientation towards looking at what meditators experience in meditation, a phenomenological approach, rather than a prescriptive one. If meditation is mostly seen from the perspective of what it’s supposed to do, an understanding of what it actually is doing in the lives of individual people will be hard to find. There are consequences to the dissemination of thousands of articles each year about how good meditation is for you, and that should also be part of the discussion.
It turns out I am going to give an answer to the meditation student’s question at the beginning of this post about the purpose of meditation. We can stop the war against ourselves. Buddhist practice can show us how that happens. As genuinely wonderful as it is for people to get relief from depression, if meditation becomes regarded as merely Welbutrin without side-effects, then the possibility of a radical reordering of the way we know experience can be lost.
I meditate for you. And, because it’s 6:00am. What a breath of fresh air! Really enjoyed this post. Thank you!
This reminds me of sesshin, of retreat. Why do we meditate? Because the bell has rung, because the sun is beginning to rise…
Thank you, Zen Doe. I’ve found your blog and your writing makes me feel as if I’ve found a new friend.
I hope so, Dan. I’m back today, cruising your previous posts. Be well, ZD
I meditate to see what happens when I remain somewhat still and relatively quiet for a certain amount of time. It’s exploring yet undiscovered landscapes where arguments and fun are sometimes joined hand in hand, where monstrous battles bubble out of nowhere (seemingly), a place where remembrances are had, both good and bad, and I see how I react to them even though they aren’t happening to me right here and now.
These are some of my thoughts. Thanks for posing the question and for the blog. It’s good to examine my intentions and good food for thought – I can (almost) always eat a little better than I already do.
You see a great deal about what happens internally when you meditate and you describe it dramatically, in your own way. There’s the observation that seemingly opposed activities coexist easily, thoughts about the experience of memory and the ability of memory to have an impact on us now. Thanks for your interesting comment, Rodney.
Your last two sentences say it all, Dan! Very powerful.
Thank you, Sarah.
Dan, I really like this post. It seems to me that meditation-as-utility is simply oriented around the craving it was originally prescribed to cure!
I like your approach (as I see it anyway) much better. Namely meditation is an end unto itself, a balance of awareness between internal and external that is whatever we make of it.
Thanks so much, Neal.
Yes, I think meditation is the experience of meditation that we have. Much better that than the experience we’re supposed to have!
Meditation can be useful. Extremely useful. It just may not be useful in the way expected. Mick Jagger made this observation many years ago. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OagFIQMs1tw
Having searched for answers for decades and finding none, what else is there to do but simply sit down and be with my “not-knowing”? Ah!
Be well~
Thank you.
If I think about the many reasons I have to meditate, some which come and go, some of which are specific to the day, the time of day, many of which have lasted but still have changed, then for me “not knowing” includes not knowing how (or feeling the need) to choose one. It’s not knowing one answer.
I really like the picture of the boys walking the spiral in the deep snow. http://bussokuseki.wordpress.com/2013/02/27/the-spiral-the-path/ And the whole post.
Thank you so much for that wonderful compliment. My practice of fatherhood has been the greatest gift…