5 Types of Dysfunctional Meditation Today,
I want to share with you 5 types of dysfunctional meditation.
As dysfunctional as meditation can be,
However,
I also want to point out that dysfunctional meditation is better than no meditation at all,
And how the dysfunctional can actually be a bridge to a meditation practice filled with a greater sense of connection and clarity of mind.
The first type of dysfunctional meditation I'll call no meditation.
This is I don't want to do it meditation.
The meditation that feels like the most boring thing in the world meditation.
The idea of sitting still makes me rather want to be electrically shocked meditation.
However,
No meditation reveals something important.
A complete distrust of our own mind,
Body,
And the present moment.
It reveals indeed that in many ways,
The quaking of our anxiety,
The non-stop nature of our thinking,
And the constant resistance to being present are but defense mechanisms against the intimacy of now.
Thomas Merton spoke to the fear of silence.
That it's more than that,
It's the fear of being alone.
It's the fear of moving past the surface bullshit of our thinking to go deeper,
To find out what we really think and believe,
Or discover what we fear,
That there may be nothing there.
No meditation,
A meditation filled with feelings of resistance,
Is dysfunctional in that it seeks to do the opposite of what meditation is for.
It seeks to be anything but now,
When the purpose of meditation is to be fully present.
However,
Resistance is a sign that there is a part of you that knows that if you give in fully to meditation,
This who you think you are that survival is oh so important is in danger of being lost to a new and better,
Clearer,
And more emphatic you.
As Alan Watts put it,
Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always derived at in the immediate moment.
A second kind of dysfunctional meditation is,
Oh shit meditation.
This is the kind of meditation that begins with remembering something you forgot to do that you were supposed to do,
Or remembering something you are supposed to do that you don't want to forget.
Now this is a very helpful thing,
But it's not meditation.
The purpose of meditation is to help us be in the now,
Not to remember all the things that are keeping us from being there.
That being said,
In my own experience,
My meditation can't help but be oh shit meditation sometimes,
So I often like to keep a notepad nearby,
So if I fear I won't remember after meditation is over,
I write it down and get back to my meditation.
I think too many of us dwell on our problems in meditation.
As much as our problems need solving,
There is no better time to let them go in meditation.
In my experience,
I don't have to worry,
They'll always be waiting for me after.
Something powerful oh shit meditation can reveal is that the things we were supposed to or are supposed to do lie on the surface of our waking consciousness,
But these thoughts are just at the tip.
Meditation can help us go deeper and deeper through the thinking mind and to the creative intelligence,
The place of ideas,
Of deeper feelings,
Of spirit.
Krishna Murti said,
Meditation is not a means to an end,
It is both the means and the end.
Another way of putting that is to say that in meditation,
I am releasing my own attachment to my life as I see it,
The to-do lists and so forth,
To enter into an experience of a deeper strand of life itself.
It is not the life I am living,
But the life that is living me.
To be with this life is meditation,
And the byproduct is to bring the power of this life into everyday activities,
Not the other way around.
A third kind of dysfunctional meditation we might call escape meditation.
Any activity we do can be used to awaken or escape.
Awaken more mindfully to what is here and now,
Or numb us out,
Not to be present,
And to pretend not to be at all.
That is why an activity that can be good for one,
Could be not so good for someone else.
This is also true of meditation.
Escape meditation actually uses meditation to not be present,
To daydream,
To worry about stuff,
To try and turn off.
I find it kind of misleading when I hear people say that the goal of meditation is to still the mind,
Or to stop thinking.
Krishnamurti also spoke about the difference between thought and intelligence.
Thought is one form of intelligence.
But in meditation we are trying to move past putting intelligence into language,
And to just experience intelligence itself,
That creative mind.
When we are trying to escape,
We are trying to rest in a thought of illusion,
And what is not real.
When back that very thought,
There is something very real,
Intelligence itself,
That when we tap into it in meditation,
It can help us realize greater creativity,
Connection,
Mindfulness and growth.
Don't stop your mind.
Unleash your mind.
Don't stop thinking.
Think clearly.
Don't stop existing.
Start being more truly you.
Charlotte Joko Beck said,
Zen practice isn't about a special place or a special peace,
Or something other than being with our life just as it is.
It's one of the hardest things for people to get,
That my very difficulties in this very moment are the perfection.
When we are attached to the way we think we should be or the way we think anyone else should be,
We can have very little appreciation of life as it is.
Whether or not we commit physical suicide,
If our attachment to our dream remains unquestioned and untouched,
We are killing ourselves,
Because our true life goes by almost unnoticed.
Then there is blame meditation,
Which I guess we could call FU meditation.
Blame meditation is where you sit down to meditate and stew about how you cannot meditate in peace because of someone or something getting in your way.
Hell,
My meditation has been hacked.
And so in blame meditation,
You stew and stew until you get close to blowing up.
It doesn't hurt anyone else but you.
And that can be the revealing part of blame meditation.
Blaming others takes away your own ability to give yourself peace of mind.
When your peace of mind belongs to someone else,
You are in deep trouble.
When it is possessed by the construction going on next door,
Or the person who hasn't gotten back to you,
Or how humid it is outside,
You've lost conscious choice.
It is then that meditation can become again about getting back to clarity,
To present,
To peace of mind.
In this way,
Meditation is an opportunity to step out of the life of being a victim to someone else's behavior,
Conscious or unconscious,
And back into anchoring yourself into a creative and assertive way of life.
Meditation in this sense is a natural form of forgiveness.
The last kind of dysfunctional meditation I'm going to call I'm all that meditation.
This is the meditation that you use to make yourself feel spiritual.
See,
You shouldn't have to act spiritual.
So this kind of inauthentic high and mighty meditation can separate you from your sincerity and inflate you in false images.
This is the meditation the person who thinks meditating longer or harder is going to produce greater results.
Meditation is not about length,
But depth.
Not about how hard or good you are at it,
But how dedicated and present you are,
Even when you're feeling like a mess.
If your meditation is an attempt to make you someone you are not already now,
It's lost.
The byproduct of daily meditation is to make you more what you are already.
What's your image of a holy person?
What's your idea of enlightenment?
What does living a perfect spiritual life look like to you?
Now ponder the possibility that those very images are the very thing that keep you from your own holiness,
From being spiritual.
Holiness is self-acceptance.
Enlightenment is awareness coupled with compassion.
A spiritual life is your life today.
Are you living it or hoping for an altered state?
Edward Villon said,
Sitting in quietness without a fixed agenda is a way of encouraging ourselves to take in the imperfections of life with a little more gentleness,
Less embarrassment,
Shame or self-criticism.
I don't know about you,
But that sounds like a fine idea to me.
