Meditation

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AJ, thank you for motivating me to write.

My practice and perspective

Practice

Awareness

To me, meditation is a way to practice focus or awareness. The two converge: To focus, either do something engrossing (psychology: flow) or learn to notice distraction and return yourself to what you intend. That noticing is awareness. That is mindfulness.

Mindfulness in plain English (see History) suggests practicing by watching the breath. The breath is always present and can be felt physically, so it's a good object of focus.

Notice the breath.

That word "notice" is incomplete: We could say "be aware of", "mind", "watch", "note". The mental processes involved in meditation predate language. They're an exercise of raw consciousness. Try to note qualities and sensations without describing them verbally: duration, force, temperature, the simple feeling of airflow at the tip of the nose.

You will get distracted and lose focus. Don't berate yourself, and don't congratulate yourself if you, paradoxically, think "I haven't gotten distracted in a while". Simply return your focus to the breath. This is the only task.

Different schools of Buddhism, for example, teach different styles of meditation, objects of focus, and sitting positions. Here's a "Wikicornucopedia":

Position

I typically sit cross legged on the ground in half lotus. I don't own a meditation cushion. I can handle about twenty minutes in this position before growing uncomfortable. (I think this is due to the tightness of my hip flexors or hamstrings.) Cushions (sometimes made of a longboard or a rolled blanket) have made this position more comfortable.

I have historically meditated with my eyes closed, but I've been trying sitting with my eyes open. In either case, I direct the eyes downward as if examining the floor maybe six to eight feet away.

Sometimes my hands are in dhyāna mudrā in my lap, although my proportions and sitting positions can make this awkward. Often I rest my hands on my knees, palms up or down. Placing my palms downward lets me pull gently against my knees to adjust my sitting position in case of mild discomfort. I'm sure that means I should sit differently or stretch more.

I sit, focusing on my breath, for twenty minutes. Specifically, I typically set my focus just under the tip of my nose, where I physically feel my breath the most. I set a timer and watch the object of my focus until it ends.

History

When I was 15 or 16, I read Sam Harris' Waking up (Wikipedia). Harris is a neuroscientist, meditator, and advocate for psychedelics. The book convinced me to try mindfulness meditation.

The sequence is fuzzy, but these things happened in the few years following:

I read Mindfulness in plain English by Bhante Gunaratana (Wikipedia: Gunaratana). This excellent, simple guide helps you sit down and begin.

I also read Altered traits (Wikipedia) by Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson. This book collects empirical evidence about meditation's effects on people.

I developed a fairly regular practice. I sat in mindfulness meditation for twenty minutes a day for at least a year and a half, faltering during some months.

I had a revelation in a parking lot. I was at school, waiting for traffic to die down, when I saw two people in my year crossing the pavement. They were popular, a romantic couple, and joyful in that moment. During that era, I would envy and resent sights like that. But some of my reading stuck: Seek the root of negative emotion, and sit with it. Don't get pulled into it. Try to watch what it does to your mind and body.

A wave of peace washed over me then for the first time and not the last. I drove all the way home in complete equanimity. I was overjoyed at their joy. Every sensation, whether I usually found it pleasant or not, was a valuable part of that moment.

Mindful moments can teach us very concrete facts: We stand on solid ground. We have air to breathe. You and I have all we need to forge connection. To know these things is to be grateful for them.

That day proved the value of meditation for me. The journalist and author Dan Harris says meditation makes him about "ten percent happier". (He named a book and a podcast after the phrase.) These years, I'm not so consistent with my practice, but I know what states and traits it offers. It is, among other things, a reliable tool I turn to repeatedly.

I meditated often during my freshman year of university. An instructor that year bonded with me over it, and she invited me to several meditation retreats throughout the following years.

Sensation and experience

Conscious experience is distinct from sensations of the body-and-mind. (Consider body-and-mind one thing.) I started to feel the effects of meditation when this statement started to click. In fact, the effects were a growing distinction between the two.

One Buddhist proverb says that a non-mindful body-and-mind is struck by two arrows whenever an archer finds their mark. The first arrow is literal and causes great pain. The second "arrow" is the suffering related to that pain; they aren't the same. Suffering is experienced by the spirit, the divine, your conscious experience. Pain is a sensation of the body-and-mind. An enlightened being is free from suffering. Through the pain, they shall not suffer.

The book Altered Traits describes the growing empirical support for the benefits of meditation. One of the experiments within goes like this: Assemble two groups of subjects: N contains non-meditators, and M contains expert meditators. (I can't recall, but I think expert entailed at least 10,000 hours of meditative practice.) Each subject was attached to a device designed to run maximally hot but non-damaging water over the back of the hand. It safely causes pain. The neuroscientists measured a particular response of the brain over time as the device was turned on, then off.

Group N presented a sort of hill-looking graph: They anticipated the coming pain, and this appeared on the readout. Their responses jumped as the pain was inflicted. They returned to a base line only slowly after the pain was gone.

Group M's readouts showed little anticipatory response. The spikes due to pain were higher than those of group N. When the pain ended, group M returned to base line immediately.

The two groups experienced the same forces for the same duration. What is the difference in their experiences? Group N suffered even outside the painful window. Group M, the expert meditators, did not. Group N's extra suffering is the second arrow.

Note: Group M did not suppress the pain. In fact, they may have felt it more intensely. But suppose you froze time in the middle of the painful window and asked a member of group M, "How do you feel?" I wager they'd say: "My body-and-mind is experiencing great pain, of course!"

"Are you suffering?"

"No, not particularly."

What about a member of group N? "How do you feel?" I wager they'd say, "I'm in great pain, of course!" (Note the difference.)

"Are you suffering?"

"Are you daft? I just told you I'm in great pain!"

The experiment demonstrates that the two groups are quite different. Neglecting many traits, we can summarize the difference:

  • Non-meditators do not distinguish sensation from experience.
  • Meditators greatly distinguish sensation from experience, and have some control over the distinction.

For venture capitalists evaluating mindfulness: here is your value-add. Here is the usable return.

Apply the distinction to anxiety. Suppose you are in public and would like to do the perfectly reasonable thing X, but there are many people around, and you viscerally fear that people will watch and judge you as you do X.

If you do not distinguish sensation from experience, then necessarily, anxiety is your experience. It makes the whole of your world. (Because what is your world if not the whole of your experience?) How could you possibly behave counter to what anxiety tells you?

If you have control over distinguishing sensation from experience, then anxiety is an event happening to the body-and-mind (which you know is not all of you). The anxiety is a large, but non-entire, part of your world. You have an inch to breathe; space to build a relationship with a phenomenon.

This is what mindfulness does for me. It suppresses nothing negative and amplifies nothing positive. Rather, it grants me influence over my relationship to phenomena. Sitting meditation also enhances my ability to focus. So, it makes me more likely to notice that a sensation is a phenomenon and not an immutable part of my conscious reality. Perhaps "intercept" is a good word, although too control oriented.