Meditation is one of those words with all manner of exotic associations. Losing ourselves in a world of bliss or serenity. Monks and mystics in faraway places. Sitting in lotus posture for hours on end.
In my experience, these associations portray a false image of what meditation is all about.
Meditation is not a fast pass to serenity and bliss. In fact, its benefits rarely come in isolation. From its earliest days, Buddhist meditation was part of an integrated approach to living a balanced, thoughtful life. The idea of meditation as a standalone practice, largely divorced from the philosophy and way of life that gave rise to it, is a more recent development.
What, then, is meditation?
At its simplest, meditation is a method to discipline the mind. To practice that method, we just need to hold our attention on an object and bring it back when our attention wanders.
You could start right now if you like. Set a timer for one minute. Sit comfortably, and focus on your breath. When your focus wanders, bring it back to your breath. When the timer ends, congratulate yourself. That was a meditation. (I’ve included a guided version of this at the end of the piece.)
You might ask, what about when my mind is intensely focused on other things, like my job, riding a bike, or reading a book? Why isn’t that meditation? It’s a good question. There’s an important difference between that type of concentration and meditation. When we focus on a task in everyday life, the mind is focused but moving. To the next word, problem, beat, or thought.
In meditation, we practice holding our attention in one place. It’s as if, instead of reading this article from start to finish, you kept your attention on one word. Focus without motion. That’s the basic chord of meditation.
What can we do with that chord? What kind of music can it play?
It turns out, a lot. Specifically, I’ll introduce two kinds. I call the first the music of serenity.
Our minds are busy places. Thoughts, emotions, memories, worries, and plans come and go, often without much say from us. We can find ourselves caught up in a train of thought or emotion before we even realize what’s happening.
Practicing meditation helps us develop more control over this activity. Each time our attention wanders and we bring it back, we are directing our attention rather than simply following wherever the mind takes us. The famous Buddhist image for this is the monkey mind—a mind constantly jumping from one thought or feeling to another. Meditation is a method to tame the monkey.
Over time, this makes the mind calmer, steadier, and better able to integrate new ideas and insights. By calming the hectic inner movement, we can let something else through. Otherwise, it’s like trying to fix a car speeding down the highway. We have to pull off to make repairs.
Eventually, we can reach deep levels of serenity and find our minds less reactive and more at ease.
This brings us to the second type of music. I call this the music of insight.
Insight means seeing something differently, with fresh eyes and newfound awareness. It is an awareness we may not have had before, or perhaps one we have had but paid little attention to.
Insight might be something about our emotions, feelings, and patterns of behavior. Or it might be more philosophical, something we have learned about the world, reality, or who we are. There are many possibilities.
In this type of meditation, we hold our attention on the insight itself. By repeatedly bringing our attention to an insight, we gradually become familiar with it until it begins to shape our experience. Even the Tibetan word for meditation, gom, means familiarity.
Buddhist traditions cultivate insight in different ways. In some, such as the practice commonly called Vipassana, we observe our experience in meditation as it unfolds, allowing insights into its nature to emerge.
My practice tradition has a method for arriving at insights, called analytical meditation. Instead of going directly into focus without motion, we use deliberate analysis of a topic until an insight arises. That insight then becomes the object of our attention. We’ll explore this method on this site.
Here is an example from my own life. I tend to want things to move quickly. That served me well in the start-up world. Less well in the Buddhist world. In one, you have to be fast and nimble. The other has been unfolding for thousands of years, evolving as it encounters new cultures. I found it hard, often painful, to align with that pace.
I believed Buddhist ideas had so much to offer our time, and I wanted them to get there faster. But the pace wasn’t mine to set. I was the one out of sync. That’s the insight. By settling my attention on that, I gradually became more in sync. I still wish things could move faster, but I’m no longer frustrated.
This is one small example of how insight can change and expand our experience. We’ll see many others.
Meditation is focus without motion. A simple tool with extraordinary possibilities. A one-minute meditation is a good place to begin.