Meditation Myths Exposed
Myth #2: Meditation is about doing nothing.
"Don't Do Something, Just Sit There!"
It may be that someone has told you to slow down, that you are doing too much. You may even have heard the spiritual cliche, "We're meant to be human beings, not human doings." Meditation too, as a popular antidote to stress, may suggest that taking time out to do nothing is the royal road to a balanced life, or even enlightenment.
But how much nothing is enough? Can we get too detached? Being able to view our thoughts and emotions objectively, without being endlessly buffeted, can be a useful skill to develop. But what do you do with that skill? Is the point of meditation to view things as they are, or is there something beyond?
Lorin Roche, in his book Whole Body Meditations argues that there is. Here's an excerpt on Going Beyond Bare Attention.
Some meditation traditions deliberately aim to dissociate attention from instinctive richness. Bare attention, or simply witnessing, is called for sometimes, but meditators who overemphasise this as technique can become overly calm and also devitalised and boring.
I have always been extremely revitalised by meditation, but I fell into the trap of monomania in my own way, and it cost me years of suffering.
Many years ago I received a heart meditation technique from my teacher, who was of the warrior caste in India. It was the classic yoga technique of placing the attention in the anahata chakra, the feeling and energy centre located in the area of the physical heart. This was a very powerful experience for me, and initially I was delighted with the feeling of vibration in my chest, and the sense of flow. When I went back a week later for a check-up, I told my teacher my experiences and he looked at me, scowled and said, "Fine, but when the road gets rough, stay with it," and that was the end of the discussion. He was a tough, no-nonsense guy, and his attitude always was to tough out whatever happened.
For months I enjoyed the nuances that the technique added to my meditation and to my life, but after about a year I began to have an ache in my heart that started as a barely there sensation and grew to be the centre of my world. I did not have the language then to say what it was, but it felt just like a heartache. It was as if I was lonely but didn't experience the emotion, I only felt the physical sensation of ache. I attended to the ache for hours every day in meditation, and it rose and fell, shifted and changed in innumerable ways, but it always returned to being an ache like loneliness.
The problem was that my attention was so bare, so totally accepting of sensation on its own level, that I did not learn from the ache. I did not enquire broadly enough, or let attention be called into other tones such as hunting and exploring for what would have helped the ache. I did not communicate and tell anyone, "I am lonely."
I did let the ache take me into the God instinct, and I had many long days completely alone, singing love songs to God in English and Sanskrit. I would mark out weeks on my calendar to be in silence, and I would go to a completely isolated beach I knew of and walk there for hours without seeing another person. Then I would sit on the sand and meditate for hours until the sun went down behind the ocean.
It took me years to realise that the ache was calling me out into the world to connect with people in ways other than just teaching meditation. I was sitting there in meditation, witnessing the ache, giving in to it fully on the level of detached awareness, but I wasn't answering its call. I was not doing anything to soothe the ache, because traditionally meditators just learn to stay with a pain and not try to change it in any way. That was fine as far as it went, but I was overdoing that one tone.
The information I needed was not overtly stated in the teachings of yoga or meditation, although it was there as part of the hidden structure. It was also common sense: follow your heart and speak from the heart. I know now that I delayed my healing for years by not following this call and letting my skills of attention become more richly nuanced.