There are so many potential benefits to meditation—among them the kind of internal resilience and steadiness that is so essential for our times.
Yet when I first started meditating, I was convinced that I couldn’t do it.
My mind wouldn’t stop thinking. My body hurt. I felt restless and agitated. The notion of “achieving” any kind of peace felt like an impossible joke.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that my experience was completely normal. I was making the whole process a lot harder by judging myself against an imagined idea of how it should be.
Since then, I’ve learned how to relate to my mind with more patience and skill. In the process, I’ve identified three common myths that can hinder your practice, or stop you from even starting.
Myth Number 1:
“Meditation is about not thinking”
Perhaps the most common misconception about meditation is that it means stopping thoughts. If you’ve ever tried to stop thinking, you know it’s futile (especially when approached in that way).
Thoughts in and of themselves are not the problem. It’s one’s relationship to thought that is the issue. We become lost in our thoughts. We react to them, fight with them, suppress or act them out. All of this consumes energy, fragments the mind, and can leave us exhausted.
The aim of meditation is not to stop thinking. It is to be more aware of thinking, so that our thoughts don’t control us.
Thinking is as natural to the mind as hearing is to our ears. If you believe you’re supposed to stop thinking, then meditation will be filled with frustration and tension. If you understand that thoughts don’t need disappear to meditate then you can begin to relax. Getting lost in thought and beginning again is simply part of the practice. With this approach, the whole process becomes more easeful and enjoyable.
Training the Mind
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When I was a kid, I fell in love with the piano. I was spellbound by the beautiful, resonant sound each key made, how it would linger if I depressed one of the pedals, and the way the notes blended when playing a chord.
I knew nothing at the beginning, but even after one lesson I could play a little bit. As I continued to practice each day, my skill improved.
Training the mind is no different.
We have little skill at first. But with even a bit of practice we gain some traction. And if we continue, gently and kindly, we learn how to handle our thoughts and internal world more adeptly.
Meditation is a practice—one of finding poise and ease with the flow of life. In doing so, we cultivate a range of inner skills like steadiness, patience, kindness, and balance. Like any other skill, it takes time to learn.
So when you sit down to meditate, pay attention to how you’re practicing. How you meditate is how you will train your mind. If you meditate with struggle, impatience and tension, then you’re reinforcing impatience and tension in your nervous system. If you meditate with kindness, patience and curiosity, you’ll strengthen those qualities.
Myth Number 2:
“meditation’s goal is to FeeL calm and peaceful.”
This myth also compels us compare our experience to an imagined ideal.
If you believe meditation is about feeling calm and peaceful, then whenever you can’t produce those states you will struggle. You are more likely to judge yourself, grow frustrated, and either muddle along feeling miserable or give up entirely.
Meditation practice isn’t about producing some special feeling of calm or bliss. States of tranquility can (and do) come. But they’re not the point; they’re in service of something deeper.
The Goals of Meditation
Meditation is about opening the heart, training the mind and understanding the nature of experience itself.
Just as the laws of physics govern the natural world, there are certain laws that govern our inner life. When we don’t understand these fundamental truths, we struggle against them, straining relationships and making difficult things in life harder.
Meditation provides a laboratory to study how the heart and mind work. The more clearly we observe direct experience, the more we understand at a deep, intuitive level that everything changes. Nothing is completely solid or dependable. Strategies of holding on and resisting hurt.
The secret of meditation is that it’s not about what happens, but how we’re relating to it.
The more we understand these laws, the less we struggle. The less we struggle, the more we experience a natural peace and clarity that is not dependent on external conditions. We realize that we ultimately can’t control things. Instead, we find freedom in learning to see clearly and letting go of rigid expectations about the way things “should be.”
Myth Number 3:
“Meditation teaches people to be comfortable with the status quo, and is thus complicit with oppression and injustice.”
If you listen to guided meditations or read books on contemplative practice, you’re likely to hear some version of the following statements: “Observe experience with nonjudgmental awareness. Accept things just as they are.”
Taken out of context, these can be misleading and potentially dangerous instructions.
Does meditation teach us to stand idly by and “observe nonjudgmentally” as someone is abused? As the Greenland ice sheet melts? Is the solution to the brutality of racism or the violence of poverty simply to “accept things as they are?”
Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Meditation Empowers Action
First, the above instructions are meant to be applied in a careful and specific manner to the internal unfolding of one’s heart and mind. They comprise two potent mental qualities—mindfulness and equanimity—that lay the groundwork for the internal transformation of contemplative practice.
When applied together, these qualities have the power to reveal and uproot deeply embedded tendencies of self-centeredness, reactivity and ignorance. The more these qualities abate, the more mindfulness and equanimity empower us. They confer the clarity and poise to act decisively and to sustain engagement with complex and daunting problems.
Second, the term “nonjudgmental” refers to the absence of a particular kind of compulsive judgment based on habit and reactivity. It is used in contradistinction to wise discernment, which arises from clear seeing and ethical sensitivity. We don’t throw out discernment; we learn to see and transform our habits of unconscious reactivity.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, the instructions are aimed at cultivating a momentary acceptance of experience — in the sense of acknowledging its reality. The word “acceptance” has at least two fundamental meanings:
To “accept” or acknowledge that something is real, is actually happening;
To “accept” as in be passive.
This ambiguity is part of what leads to confusion. The mediation instructions are using the term “accept the way things are” in the first sense — to fully acknowledge and experience the reality of present circumstances. This kind of direct awareness is the first step of any kind of transformation—spiritual or social. It’s only when we recognize a problem that we can begin to work for change.
For example, on the social level, in the Movement for Black Lives today, as during the Civil Rights movement of the 60s, a key starting point is the “acceptance” that racism is a real force in society. This acknowledgement of reality leads to action rather than passivity.
Mindfulness and equanimity bring us face to face with the truth of our life. They do not preclude taking action or responding wisely. Rather than a prescription for indifference, they help create enough space to recognize, honor and feel our emotional responses without being consumed by them. Instead of avoiding reality, sinking in despair, or reacting out of hatred or fear, we can respond with clarity, wisdom, and compassion in a way that is likely to be more sustainable and effective.
In the end, each of us needs to find our own way in meditation practice. It can be deeply nourishing, profoundly healing, and ultimately call forth our greatest gifts to share with the world. But in order to do that, we need to understand how to go about the practice properly. Dispelling the myths and false notions we have about it is a good place to start.