I have been paying attention to what makes a meditation feel successful. A few metaphors have come up for me when I think about what this feels like.
Exercise
I had a discussion with friends about this, in which I compared meditation to exercise as follows:
- When we are sitting in the right posture but totally lost in thought, it’s like being at the gym hunched over our phone, sitting on a bench, not doing any exercise.
- When we wake up and realize we’ve been off track and come back to the present, it’s like doing a rep of an exercise (e.g. barbell lift).
- When we are able to maintain the presence for any sustained amount of time, it’s like doing a static exercise, like a plank or holding a handstand or a squat in a specific position.
Sometimes people work on balance by standing on a half exercise ball, or an inflated disc. It doesn’t look like much is happening, but a lot of muscles are continuously flexing to different degrees, to keep the person upright and not falling off in any direction. To me, meditating “successfully” often feels like this, only it’s “balancing” our attention. It’s actually work, and it’s fairly easy to fall off the unbalanced object, as it is to fall out of the present moment and into future/past, and fantasy land.
The exercise metaphor has its limits, because with physical exercise the muscles are contracted, and in meditation they tend to be the opposite. The “muscle” that is contracted is the concentration/attention/awareness muscle, which isn’t a muscle. And when it is engaged, the actual physical muscles in the body are often, I find, at their least contracted.
Staying awake
Losing presence during a meditation feels to me a bit like falling asleep. I’m reminded of being in college classes, sleep deprived, and nodding off with a hand on my downward cast forehead that also shielded my closed eyes from the professor’s view and made it look like I was reading an open book on my desk (or at least that was what I was going for).
Sometimes, if the lecture was really boring, the pull to fall asleep was so powerful there seemed to be no amount of willpower that could stave it off. I think I could actually achieve sleep for a minute or so sitting completely upright in my desk like that, but then I’d wake up and come back into the room. Losing focus and presence in meditation has this sort of falling asleep quality. And recognizing we lost touch with our awareness and coming back to it has a feeling like waking up from actual sleep. There is a similar “this-is-reality” and “I-was-somewhere-else-just-a-few-seconds-ago” recognition.
Being a sentinel
Expanding the sleep metaphor slightly, I recently had the image of keeping guard for a camp or tribe of allies, scouting the darkness for potential threats. The threats in meditation are distracting thoughts that can catch our attention and lead us on a wild goose chase. Some of these thoughts are very alluring, and it’s normal, at least for me, to fall asleep at the helm, or be led away leaving the camp unattended.
Trance/hypnosis
When slices of meditation time feel unproductive, it feels to me like being hypnotized, or in a trance. I think of the spell from Harry Potter, the Imperius curse, in which the victim is mind-controlled to do the bidding of the one casting the spell, without knowing it, like a puppet on strings, as if their consciousness and personal will were offline. The moment I come back to presence, there is a feeling that I just was released from the Imperius curse, or some sort of hypnotic trance. I usually have a sense of how long I’ve been “gone.” These periods can range from just a second or two to more than a minute. But there is memory and recognition of where I was. I can typically remember a lot of what thoughts my mind ran off too, once it’s free from them. Interestingly, I think the Harry Potter characters who were under the Imperius curse could also remember what they were forced to do, once they woke up.
Being present feels good, but also takes energy
My observation is that it feels both productive but also somewhat taxing to maintain the meditation, to stay awake. Coming back into the moment has a feeling a bit like getting free from something that was tangled around me. There’s more clarity and peace, but also a sense that some energy is required to stay in that place, just like balancing physically on an unstable object.
I think that over time, the amount of energy this takes decreases.
Also, I don’t remember always recognizing the relief and peace of coming back to the present. I think early on in my practice, it felt not only taxing but also unpleasant to stay present.
What “staying present” means
A lot of meditation instruction involves picking an object of focus and continuing to come back to it. The typical “object” is the breath, but other common ones include sounds, smells, sights, tastes, or a specific part of the body.
My practice tends to instead be allowing my attention to drift to where it “wants” to go, but without getting lost in that venture. I typically start with my awareness centered widely around my head and torso. I notice what the breath is like, what energy is in my heart, what sensations are in my head. But I don’t have a plan on what to focus on. For example, I might quickly scan my arms and hands, come back to the chest, the center of my head, notice the air entering my nostrils, notice an urge to subtly tense up or breath shallowly, after which point my next breath naturally is a little deeper and more full.
Some thoughts will come up before long, and I’ll notice them. This is where the danger is highest that I’ll “fall asleep” or fall off the exercise balance ball, depending on your metaphor of choice. Sometimes it is apparent why I had the thought, like it might be something I need to do later, or new creative idea, like “I should write about this process…”
Other times it’s unclear what the thoughts mean, if anything, and they seem random. I tend to trust my intuition here about the usefulness of thoughts, believing that many are actually strategies for avoiding sensation and emotion in my body. If a thought feels like a filler, like useless inner chitter chatter, I suspect it’s there as a red herring that my mind created to prevent me from being with something unpleasant. So in that situation, I’ll likely go back to my torso (heart, gut, head) and see if there are difficult emotions, like anxiety or unease or sadness, and just let those be, watching them, reminding myself that they need to be accepted and allowed if this time is to be helpful. Otherwise it’s an exercise in futile control.
I could give many more possible scenarios, but the main point here is that I am not rigid about focusing solely on the breath or a sound. Those can, I’m sure, be beneficial practices, but I feel that I get more out of going with the attention flow, without getting lost in the objects that my awareness explores.
Some queues that I’m on the right track are feeling unclenched at an emotional level, and noticing that my breath naturally is more open, slow and deeper. But not because I’m trying to make it deep. To me that’s too much control and feels like counterproductive chasing after a desired experience. For me it feels like the wrong kind of doing. It feels better to just ask, “how deep does the breath WANT to be right now?” and it’ll tend to reach a moderate amount of depth that turns out to feel right. I let the body “decide” on it’s own, by just observing, rather than employing the mind to choose a certain breath depth level.
So is there something to “do” while meditating? I think so. But it doesn’t look like most “doing.” It is like staying awake, like staying balanced on a wobbly object, like keeping watch out for invaders, or like the opposite of hypnosis.
Ending the meditation
So how do I know when my meditation is over? I used to set a timer for a pre-decided amount of time. I think that’s the most common way, and it’s just fine. Maybe even the best.
These days I’m using a stopwatch which counts up from zero. When I’m done, I don’t reset the time, so that if decide to do more “sits” later that day, I will just continue where the stopwatch was left off. At the end of the day, I’ll have a running total. Maybe this will be 12 minutes, or 33 minutes, or 48 minutes. It depends on what my soul needed that day, which I don’t know in advance.
So how do I decide when a sit is over? Sometimes it’s because I need to go do something. But the mind is tricky that way; it will often try to end the meditation prematurely with to-do list task proposals. I try to let go of the first few impulses to end the meditation. Similar to how I might ignore some initial food cravings, to see if it’s real hunger or just a craving. If the sense, “it’s over” is persistent and enduring, I will likely end the session. If I feel more alive moving on with life than with another 3 minutes of sitting, I’ll end. If I’m feeling centered and cleared out, for now, I’ll end.
This just works for me. I also know that I’ll likely go back to sitting soon enough that same day, so I don’t worry too much about choosing the “right” time to end. If I realize 20 minutes later that I needed more time, I will just continue the stopwatch, sit and close my eyes, and log more time.