Is it a cause for worry if meditation feels like a crutch? I think it probably isn't, really, but my ingrained Protestant morality thinks I shouldn't have a crutch, no matter how bruised I feel.
I'm curious, Jean, as to *how* meditation could be a crutch. Is your ingrained Protestant morality thinking you "should" be naturally calm & mindful, without needing a daily technique to train that habit? If so, then daily exercise is a crutch too: I suppose we all "should" naturally be fit & slim, but the real world isn't like that.
If you were spending hours in meditation to the exclusion of other tasks & relationships, I guess you could worry about using meditation as an *escape* from daily life...but given the small doses of meditation we all squeeze into our otherwise hectic lives, I don't think there's much chance that meditation is going to take over the rest of our lives.
I guess if we were to look for crutches in our lives, there are many *other* things we use (and misuse) to get by: food, drink, sex, mindless entertainment, etc. Of these, I think meditation is certainly the most innocuous.
But maybe I'm misconstruing what you mean by "crutch," so tell us more about what you mean by the term.
I just sat a semi-distracted 15 minutes. I'm still finding it difficult to get back into the meditation habit, but I'm persevering regardless. :-)
Meditation is a daily necessity for me, without it I begin to feel increasingly exhausted. Even when the session has been difficult with an inability to rest my mind, it still rejuvinates me, enables me to cope. It's as important as sleeping or eating, both of which are forms of energy. Meditation gives me peace in the very deepest places. Until I joined this group I rarely even mentioned to anyone that I meditate daily. It's a normal thing to do in the course of a day.
That it could be considered a crutch is interesting, Jean. The loving kindness meditation I've now added (as a gift from you) is so beautiful that one might wish to spend hours meditating on/with loving kindness. If that was the case, I'd simply set aside an evening and do it for two and half hours. I'd let it right in to me, in other words.
The other thing is that meditating changes the brain waves and probably increases secretions of certain hormones, all of which lead us to 'feel better.' These are the same brain waves and neurotransmitters and hormones that are released by drugs? I haven't done any research in this area in a long time and all my notes are in storage from when I used to teach yoga. Does anyone have easy access to this material?
When I first began doing yoga I often did kriyas or sets for 3 hours or more a day! Plus hours of meditation. Then I started teaching 3 classes a week, was up for Sadhana at 4 or 5 am every morning, a 2.5 hour chant with women at my house weekly, and my nightly meditation. It was intense. I worried about addiction too. It turned out to be was a deeply healing time in my life. The person who went into that and the one who came out 5 or 6 years later were different- calmer, happier, more trusting, more loving.
That kind of addiction is surely good. We need to hear more, Jean!
If you have some time, here is a great web site to browse, Mind and Reality. The Dalai Lama told Buddhists to leave superstition and explore neuroscience, and there is a great conference in a few days, "Mind and Reality Symposium," at Columbia University. The Mind & Reality website offers the conference program with all the panels and a number of papers as well..."Indo-Tibetan Science in the 21st Century." Here's a keynote from the panel, Is Meditation a Means of Knowledge? by the philosopher, Mark Siderits. I've subscribed to the site's RRS feed; it's a bonanza.
Brenda, thank you for that; I do tend to agree with everything you say, and it's very interesting to know that you did worry about 'addiction' when meditating several hours a day, but found that it had been an important time of healing - quite the opposite, obviously, from any kind of addiction.
Trying to be clearer about what I mean, as asked by Lorianne: I suppose I do mean by a 'crutch' the same as using exercise, chocolate, sex (fat chance) or whatever in order to feel better, and in that context it's obviously less negative than eg chocolate as it doesn't make me fat or rot my teeth. I don't mean so much feeling that I 'should' be able to be calm and mindful by a spontaneous effort of will - there just wouldn't be anything helpful about thinking that. It's more that at times like lately when I've been ill and tired and getting behind with everything, I have kept meditating and it's been an almost invariably positive experience in itself. But when I find myself thinking, well, everything else is going to pot but I do keep meditating, I'm feel somehow uneasy. What status does it have in my life as a whole? I think I tend to view it as a weight on the plus side, some sort of a counterbalance to the 'failures', and I don't want that to be my movitation. I want it to be its OWN justification and motivation. Not being coherent at all. Maybe I'll think about this more and try again :-)
Lorianne, I'm not surprised if crossing the world twice in a few days made it difficult to settle on your cushion - even when a very happy time, what a huge jangling experience for the whole system, perhaps all the more so for someone who is very 'present' to their surroundings. Coming back to stillness from that is a long journey.
Jean, that's so interesting. I think you're very perceptive to pick up on that. One Buddhist (or was it Christian?) teacher wrote something along these lines, saying that we ought to be able to just do something that is good or right without adding a "pat-on-the-back" thought afterwards. I try to remember that, although for me it is more a sense of trying to learn to just maintain the practice, do the good deed, say the kind thing without congratulating myself. This is yet another level of practice and I find it extremely difficult. But I agree with the teacher that the additional thought is truly additional, and worth noting and analyzing. Right now I need to re-establish my practice itself!!
The only thing I have to add to all the smart things that have been said here is that I think it helps to think of meditation in a much wider context of time. We tend to think of it on the model of exercise or medicine -- expecting "results" from it -- meaning positive changes in our daily lives -- within weeks or even hours. In my experience it doesn't work like that (well, except when you get fireworks for free, which can happen, but almost never when you need it :->). There certainly is an interplay between meditation and positive changes in my daily life, but they're usually quite long term. The Dalai Lama once said that you should never evaluate how well any meditation is going in a narrower time-span than six months.
There can be very rich stuff going on in my meditation that doesn't surface in my life till months later -- it's like I gain a new realization on one level, but it takes a long time for it to percolate down to the level of how I eat breakfast or what kind of attention I pay to my son. I think most of the day-to-day connections we see between meditation and feeling better or doing better are actually coincidental, either just our ordinary mood-swings, or just that we get the causality wrong -- actually we're meditating because we feel better, not feeling better because we meditate. The most important changes are moving slower than that.
Dale, I think my problem is the reverse actually. I do see results, even in the very short term, from meditation and, whilst I welcome them, I don't want to get hung up or reliant on them or to appreciate them so quantitively - it almost makes me want to turn away.
Brenda, thank you for the site, which I will definitely investigate - and which was not what I was thanking you for before. This symposium is the latest, I think, in the series of events that I mentioned a while ago, of which one is reported in Daniel Goleman's book 'Destructive Emotions', which Ruth has also mentioned.
Quantitatively, I mean. I spent this morning copyediting a dissertation chapter that must have had that word 20 times... I guess my brain is sick of it.
After I had spent 4 hours on the chapter (not mine. I copyedit stuff written in English by non-native speakers to make a bit of extra money), having taken half a day off from the officed to do it, when I tried to email it I couldn't locate the file. It took me an hour to locate it, but I kept methodically trying different search mechanisms, sure that since I'd saved to the file at least 100 times it must be there somewhere, and I did find it. I am, alas, very much the kind of person who would normally burst into tears and throw the laptop, so this felt like real progress.
I suppose it's not that I don't want such measurable progress, it's that I want to be able not to fixate on it.
Of course it's possible to become "attached" to meditation, and that will generate suffering as reliably as any other kind of attachment will.
But a) I don't see that we have any choice and b) I'm confident that the meditation itself will dissolve that attachment, given enough time.
The only thing that can possibly fuel practice is attachment and aversion. It's what we've got. Enlightened mind doesn't have any interest in meditation -- why would it have? It has no need or desire to make any progress or achieve anything. If you can go straight there, you certainly should, and not mess about with all this tedious sitting :-)
My guess would be that the desire not to fixate on the meditation is itself a fruit of the meditation, and while it's a good sign, it would not be skillful to respond to it by trying to change your attitude toward meditation, or to prematurely try to cut yourself off from your motivation to practice. Everything you say gives me the impression that you're right where you should be doing exactly what you should be doing.
Mmm, I think the answer to all this chuntering is probably: if something feels like pointless mental chuntering let it go, and keep on letting go, of more and more layers of thoughts about thoughts, whether within meditation or about meditation...
i think i could liken it to excercise and fresh air though (unlike chocolate) because, despite the immediate high, there are long term health - both mental and physical - to going out and moving and being in nature every day.
i feel like the place i intended the benefits of my meditation practice to surface - ie my relatiosnship with myself and with J - are only just surfacing after ...150 days - 5 months? did you say 6 months dale?
hang in there jean, tere are worst addictions! sometimes a practice and an addiction are very close. I know if I do this every day it makes me feel good long AND short term (unlike alcahol and sugar which are just short term feelgoods)
I'm enjoying reading today's conversation. I can't relate it to my meditation practice, but I can to other 'soul'-oriented projects where I get, ummm, fluffed up, like the massive research project on light I didn't do at 30, and this White Fire/epic prose poem on the history of love thing. The sense of feeling 'fluffed up' is so disquieting and uncomfortable I've put the project on the back burner until I can handle it as just another piece of writing.
When I meditate I go where there's no language. It is hard, therefore, to talk about. I think & think all day, & dream & dream all night, and meditation is a time to rest my mind. While I don't know what anyone else's experience of nothingness is, or the void, but that's what I connect with. It's very rich and very peaceful and very empty but very full of love and light. Oxymorons! Words!
Jean, you should be very pleased at the patience you exhibited over the lost file, and perhaps it is a direct result of meditating on a regular basis, or perhaps it's a result of the same consciousness that is deciding to meditate and to allow the perturbations of daily life not to ruffle it too much.
I love what Dale said, that the meditation will eventually undo attachment to it.
When I first started meditating I was so into it and it felt like "the answer" because I really did get insights that helped me a lot, from the start. Now, many years later, it's much harder for me to keep going so diligently even though I KNOW the benefits; maybe I am just more easily bored with it, or it doesn't feel special or like it's going to generate any great big changes. I'm being really honest here...don't judge me too harshly! And of course I recognize that for the trap and illusion it is, but it's still an impediment to faithful practice. And none of that means that I think I've arrived anywhere - far far from it. I think it is more like a weight-loss plateau, or the "desert" we speak about in Christianity. I go there, much of it is predictable, it has a definite benefit -- but deep down I think the ego wants surprises, something new, a breakthrough. I know that isn't going to happen the way it did before. And, like life itself, meditation is more about a continuum and seeing what happens on a much longer period, like Dale said. So for me, the motivation has to come from someplace different than it used to, I think, and I haven't figured that out yet in a way that keeps me on the cushion every day.
Beth, I hear & echo you. Having been meditating for some 15 years now, at times it seems very automatic & routine, like brushing one's teeth or eating breakfast. Yes, sometimes breakfast is an experience that causes great sensory delight...but most of the time, you eat breakfast because you know your body needs nourishment, so you do it even if the rest of you is on auto-pilot.
I (try to) meditate everyday because I know I "need" it in the same way I need food...but sometimes it feels automatic & "mindless" in the way that other daily tasks feel automatic & "mindless." That doesn't mean it's not good & beneficial: meditation, like breakfast, is always nourishing. But I don't necessarily get the same "gee whiz, meditation is WONDERFUL" feeling I got when I first started practicing.
Maybe long-term practice is like a long-term relationship in this regard? The honeymoon feeling wears off, and something different (not better or worse) takes its place?
If you practice the Vajrayana, there's all kinds of fun things you can do, new practices you can undertake, different visualizations & sadanas and what not -- if I remember right there's some that involve playing a flute made of a human thighbone, and ones in which you visualize chopping yourself into chunks and offering the chunks to demons.
I don't know if it's the tradition or just my lama, but he's pretty up front about the multiplicity of practices addressing (among other things) boredom.
I find that even with shamatha, just changing the object of meditation, from my breath to ambiant sound or to a visual object or visual image, can make it surprisingly new. & I don't think there's anything wrong with that -- we need to shake ourselves up every once in a while. (Going on retreat with a good teacher is probably the ideal way to do that, but that takes money and time.)
I'm not a big fan of just "white-knuckling" your way through things by force of will (probably because I have to be pretty stingy with my will; there's not quite enough to go around :->)
17 Comments:
Good morning!
Is it a cause for worry if meditation feels like a crutch? I think it probably isn't, really, but my ingrained Protestant morality thinks I shouldn't have a crutch, no matter how bruised I feel.
I'm curious, Jean, as to *how* meditation could be a crutch. Is your ingrained Protestant morality thinking you "should" be naturally calm & mindful, without needing a daily technique to train that habit? If so, then daily exercise is a crutch too: I suppose we all "should" naturally be fit & slim, but the real world isn't like that.
If you were spending hours in meditation to the exclusion of other tasks & relationships, I guess you could worry about using meditation as an *escape* from daily life...but given the small doses of meditation we all squeeze into our otherwise hectic lives, I don't think there's much chance that meditation is going to take over the rest of our lives.
I guess if we were to look for crutches in our lives, there are many *other* things we use (and misuse) to get by: food, drink, sex, mindless entertainment, etc. Of these, I think meditation is certainly the most innocuous.
But maybe I'm misconstruing what you mean by "crutch," so tell us more about what you mean by the term.
I just sat a semi-distracted 15 minutes. I'm still finding it difficult to get back into the meditation habit, but I'm persevering regardless. :-)
Meditation is a daily necessity for me, without it I begin to feel increasingly exhausted. Even when the session has been difficult with an inability to rest my mind, it still rejuvinates me, enables me to cope. It's as important as sleeping or eating, both of which are forms of energy. Meditation gives me peace in the very deepest places. Until I joined this group I rarely even mentioned to anyone that I meditate daily. It's a normal thing to do in the course of a day.
That it could be considered a crutch is interesting, Jean. The loving kindness meditation I've now added (as a gift from you) is so beautiful that one might wish to spend hours meditating on/with loving kindness. If that was the case, I'd simply set aside an evening and do it for two and half hours. I'd let it right in to me, in other words.
The other thing is that meditating changes the brain waves and probably increases secretions of certain hormones, all of which lead us to 'feel better.' These are the same brain waves and neurotransmitters and hormones that are released by drugs? I haven't done any research in this area in a long time and all my notes are in storage from when I used to teach yoga. Does anyone have easy access to this material?
When I first began doing yoga I often did kriyas or sets for 3 hours or more a day! Plus hours of meditation. Then I started teaching 3 classes a week, was up for Sadhana at 4 or 5 am every morning, a 2.5 hour chant with women at my house weekly, and my nightly meditation. It was intense. I worried about addiction too. It turned out to be was a deeply healing time in my life. The person who went into that and the one who came out 5 or 6 years later were different- calmer, happier, more trusting, more loving.
That kind of addiction is surely good. We need to hear more, Jean!
If you have some time, here is a great web site to browse, Mind and Reality. The Dalai Lama told Buddhists to leave superstition and explore neuroscience, and there is a great conference in a few days, "Mind and Reality Symposium," at Columbia University. The Mind & Reality website offers the conference program with all the panels and a number of papers as well..."Indo-Tibetan Science in the 21st Century." Here's a keynote from the panel, Is Meditation a Means of Knowledge? by the philosopher, Mark Siderits. I've subscribed to the site's RRS feed; it's a bonanza.
Brenda, thank you for that; I do tend to agree with everything you say, and it's very interesting to know that you did worry about 'addiction' when meditating several hours a day, but found that it had been an important time of healing - quite the opposite, obviously, from any kind of addiction.
Trying to be clearer about what I mean, as asked by Lorianne: I suppose I do mean by a 'crutch' the same as using exercise, chocolate, sex (fat chance) or whatever in order to feel better, and in that context it's obviously less negative than eg chocolate as it doesn't make me fat or rot my teeth. I don't mean so much feeling that I 'should' be able to be calm and mindful by a spontaneous effort of will - there just wouldn't be anything helpful about thinking that. It's more that at times like lately when I've been ill and tired and getting behind with everything, I have kept meditating and it's been an almost invariably positive experience in itself. But when I find myself thinking, well, everything else is going to pot but I do keep meditating, I'm feel somehow uneasy. What status does it have in my life as a whole? I think I tend to view it as a weight on the plus side, some sort of a counterbalance to the 'failures', and I don't want that to be my movitation. I want it to be its OWN justification and motivation. Not being coherent at all. Maybe I'll think about this more and try again :-)
Lorianne, I'm not surprised if crossing the world twice in a few days made it difficult to settle on your cushion - even when a very happy time, what a huge jangling experience for the whole system, perhaps all the more so for someone who is very 'present' to their surroundings. Coming back to stillness from that is a long journey.
Jean, that's so interesting. I think you're very perceptive to pick up on that. One Buddhist (or was it Christian?) teacher wrote something along these lines, saying that we ought to be able to just do something that is good or right without adding a "pat-on-the-back" thought afterwards. I try to remember that, although for me it is more a sense of trying to learn to just maintain the practice, do the good deed, say the kind thing without congratulating myself. This is yet another level of practice and I find it extremely difficult. But I agree with the teacher that the additional thought is truly additional, and worth noting and analyzing. Right now I need to re-establish my practice itself!!
The only thing I have to add to all the smart things that have been said here is that I think it helps to think of meditation in a much wider context of time. We tend to think of it on the model of exercise or medicine -- expecting "results" from it -- meaning positive changes in our daily lives -- within weeks or even hours. In my experience it doesn't work like that (well, except when you get fireworks for free, which can happen, but almost never when you need it :->). There certainly is an interplay between meditation and positive changes in my daily life, but they're usually quite long term. The Dalai Lama once said that you should never evaluate how well any meditation is going in a narrower time-span than six months.
There can be very rich stuff going on in my meditation that doesn't surface in my life till months later -- it's like I gain a new realization on one level, but it takes a long time for it to percolate down to the level of how I eat breakfast or what kind of attention I pay to my son. I think most of the day-to-day connections we see between meditation and feeling better or doing better are actually coincidental, either just our ordinary mood-swings, or just that we get the causality wrong -- actually we're meditating because we feel better, not feeling better because we meditate. The most important changes are moving slower than that.
Dale, I think my problem is the reverse actually. I do see results, even in the very short term, from meditation and, whilst I welcome them, I don't want to get hung up or reliant on them or to appreciate them so quantitively - it almost makes me want to turn away.
Brenda, thank you for the site, which I will definitely investigate - and which was not what I was thanking you for before. This symposium is the latest, I think, in the series of events that I mentioned a while ago, of which one is reported in Daniel Goleman's book 'Destructive Emotions', which Ruth has also mentioned.
Quantitatively, I mean. I spent this morning copyediting a dissertation chapter that must have had that word 20 times... I guess my brain is sick of it.
After I had spent 4 hours on the chapter (not mine. I copyedit stuff written in English by non-native speakers to make a bit of extra money), having taken half a day off from the officed to do it, when I tried to email it I couldn't locate the file. It took me an hour to locate it, but I kept methodically trying different search mechanisms, sure that since I'd saved to the file at least 100 times it must be there somewhere, and I did find it. I am, alas, very much the kind of person who would normally burst into tears and throw the laptop, so this felt like real progress.
I suppose it's not that I don't want such measurable progress, it's that I want to be able not to fixate on it.
Oh, I see. I think.
Of course it's possible to become "attached" to meditation, and that will generate suffering as reliably as any other kind of attachment will.
But a) I don't see that we have any choice and b) I'm confident that the meditation itself will dissolve that attachment, given enough time.
The only thing that can possibly fuel practice is attachment and aversion. It's what we've got. Enlightened mind doesn't have any interest in meditation -- why would it have? It has no need or desire to make any progress or achieve anything. If you can go straight there, you certainly should, and not mess about with all this tedious sitting :-)
My guess would be that the desire not to fixate on the meditation is itself a fruit of the meditation, and while it's a good sign, it would not be skillful to respond to it by trying to change your attitude toward meditation, or to prematurely try to cut yourself off from your motivation to practice. Everything you say gives me the impression that you're right where you should be doing exactly what you should be doing.
Mmm, I think the answer to all this chuntering is probably: if something feels like pointless mental chuntering let it go, and keep on letting go, of more and more layers of thoughts about thoughts, whether within meditation or about meditation...
mmm very interesting!!
i think i could liken it to excercise and fresh air though (unlike chocolate) because, despite the immediate high, there are long term health - both mental and physical - to going out and moving and being in nature every day.
i feel like the place i intended the benefits of my meditation practice to surface - ie my relatiosnship with myself and with J - are only just surfacing after ...150 days - 5 months? did you say 6 months dale?
hang in there jean, tere are worst addictions! sometimes a practice and an addiction are very close. I know if I do this every day it makes me feel good long AND short term (unlike alcahol and sugar which are just short term feelgoods)
I'm enjoying reading today's conversation. I can't relate it to my meditation practice, but I can to other 'soul'-oriented projects where I get, ummm, fluffed up, like the massive research project on light I didn't do at 30, and this White Fire/epic prose poem on the history of love thing. The sense of feeling 'fluffed up' is so disquieting and uncomfortable I've put the project on the back burner until I can handle it as just another piece of writing.
When I meditate I go where there's no language. It is hard, therefore, to talk about. I think & think all day, & dream & dream all night, and meditation is a time to rest my mind. While I don't know what anyone else's experience of nothingness is, or the void, but that's what I connect with. It's very rich and very peaceful and very empty but very full of love and light. Oxymorons! Words!
Jean, you should be very pleased at the patience you exhibited over the lost file, and perhaps it is a direct result of meditating on a regular basis, or perhaps it's a result of the same consciousness that is deciding to meditate and to allow the perturbations of daily life not to ruffle it too much.
I love what Dale said, that the meditation will eventually undo attachment to it.
I like it best when my meditation meditates me.
Whatever that means -:)
When I first started meditating I was so into it and it felt like "the answer" because I really did get insights that helped me a lot, from the start. Now, many years later, it's much harder for me to keep going so diligently even though I KNOW the benefits; maybe I am just more easily bored with it, or it doesn't feel special or like it's going to generate any great big changes. I'm being really honest here...don't judge me too harshly! And of course I recognize that for the trap and illusion it is, but it's still an impediment to faithful practice. And none of that means that I think I've arrived anywhere - far far from it. I think it is more like a weight-loss plateau, or the "desert" we speak about in Christianity. I go there, much of it is predictable, it has a definite benefit -- but deep down I think the ego wants surprises, something new, a breakthrough. I know that isn't going to happen the way it did before. And, like life itself, meditation is more about a continuum and seeing what happens on a much longer period, like Dale said. So for me, the motivation has to come from someplace different than it used to, I think, and I haven't figured that out yet in a way that keeps me on the cushion every day.
Beth, I hear & echo you. Having been meditating for some 15 years now, at times it seems very automatic & routine, like brushing one's teeth or eating breakfast. Yes, sometimes breakfast is an experience that causes great sensory delight...but most of the time, you eat breakfast because you know your body needs nourishment, so you do it even if the rest of you is on auto-pilot.
I (try to) meditate everyday because I know I "need" it in the same way I need food...but sometimes it feels automatic & "mindless" in the way that other daily tasks feel automatic & "mindless." That doesn't mean it's not good & beneficial: meditation, like breakfast, is always nourishing. But I don't necessarily get the same "gee whiz, meditation is WONDERFUL" feeling I got when I first started practicing.
Maybe long-term practice is like a long-term relationship in this regard? The honeymoon feeling wears off, and something different (not better or worse) takes its place?
Thanks, Lorianne. Yeah, maybe that's it. Let's think more about this...
If you practice the Vajrayana, there's all kinds of fun things you can do, new practices you can undertake, different visualizations & sadanas and what not -- if I remember right there's some that involve playing a flute made of a human thighbone, and ones in which you visualize chopping yourself into chunks and offering the chunks to demons.
I don't know if it's the tradition or just my lama, but he's pretty up front about the multiplicity of practices addressing (among other things) boredom.
I find that even with shamatha, just changing the object of meditation, from my breath to ambiant sound or to a visual object or visual image, can make it surprisingly new. & I don't think there's anything wrong with that -- we need to shake ourselves up every once in a while. (Going on retreat with a good teacher is probably the ideal way to do that, but that takes money and time.)
I'm not a big fan of just "white-knuckling" your way through things by force of will (probably because I have to be pretty stingy with my will; there's not quite enough to go around :->)
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