How do we settle the mind, rest the mind, given the turmoil of our times? What shall we do when we hear something in the news or disturbing information we fear? How can we settle the mind with what we are or will be confronted with as we face things in the world out of our control? Do we need years of meditation or is there something more immediate, more accessible, more innate than the practice of meditation? Is there a more sublime meditation than the kind that follows instructions? Can we let the mind rest? Can we let the mind be perfect as it is?
Once a student at one of my talks said that they had been trying to meditate and it was making them suffer. The person’s facial expression showed anguish. I leaned towards the student in a room of about sixty people, and said, “Stop meditating.” I said this at a Buddhist meditation center, wearing my Zen Buddhist robes. It was an offer to the student to not struggle; to stop forcing themselves to reach for some idea of a meditative state of being; to forget about levitating above the shaky ground of suffering and drifting off into the heaven of nirvana.
I wanted to throw that person off their cushion or seat of meditative achievement. I wanted to dismantle the expert mind of knowing how to meditate. I feel it important to startle meditators and shake them loose from the habit of meditation, the notion that thoughts are the worst thing that can happen to a meditator. My interest is to encourage meditators to expand the walls of meditation beyond instruction, posture, time spent, and methods of breathing—to cease targeting their meditation upon their perception of transformation or change that is inherently already taking place. Many say they don’t have time to meditate. This is because they see the act of meditation as something in which one steps out of or stops their lives and then returns with a clear mind and a happy heart. It is as if they go into some invisible magic box and erase all thinking.
In asking aspirants to stop meditating I’m turning hardened views of meditation towards the nature of mind as already free and allowing the mind to remain free of our alterations.
Many are taught in regard to meditation to pay attention, to cultivate, to be mindful, to be in the present moment, to count the breath, to cease discursive thinking, to concentrate, to achieve emptiness, to think non-dually, to look deeply, or to do something to stop our minds from being a problem. Some are taught to listen and yet this listening often becomes yet another task to accomplish.
Many try to do the things I just mentioned all at the onset of their meditation practice and then try to master it all within a month or two. They feel they must hurry towards a profound state of focus and a unified consciousness of the highest reality. They must hurry so that all suffering can cease and so that all is good at their job or in relationship with loved ones. The practice of meditation then becomes an intellectual effort, a task, hard work in the midst of other hard work, a place of struggle, and even perhaps a source of suffering. What would it feel like to climb down from the ladder of mastering meditation and to land on relief, on a peaceful relationship with the mind?