Monthly Archives: September 2016

8 Common Mistakes of Meditators

meditation-manMany meditation teachers say that there is no wrong way to meditate. That showing up and doing the practice is what’s important. Having said that, the following list of common mistakes or misconceptions about meditation keep showing up in my teaching with students. They are:

1. Not Doing it Every Day

Like any healthy habit, meditation should be practiced every day. When we embark on a meditation practice, we are essentially committing ourselves to an ongoing process of training the mind. That doesn’t mean training the mind on some days but not on days when we don’t feel like it. Sitting every day for just a few minutes is far better than sitting once a week for an hour. That’s because the continuity of mind-body observation established by daily practice keeps us close to the realm of awareness. When we practice sitting every day, we are more likely to respond with awareness in our daily activities and to be less reactive. Even if you only sit for 10 minutes a day, your practice is having an effect on your brain, on the way you relate to the world and others, and on your ability to focus. So if you take your practice seriously, find a way to carve out some time each day to do it.

2. Trying to Get Rid of Thoughts

It’s a common misconception that when we meditate one of our goals should be to have a blank mind, without any thoughts in it. Unfortunately the mind doesn’t tend to cooperate. One of the more humbling aspects of meditation is the recognition that we can’t really control our thoughts. They tend to come and go rather randomly. If we try to get rid of our thoughts, essentially trying to do the impossible, we place ourselves in a contentious and aversive relationship to our minds. We are being unkind to ourselves. What we can control, however, is how we relate to our thoughts. Rather than trying to get rid of our thoughts, we should aim to notice how they appear and disappear, and what mental habit patterns they reveal. When we see the transitory nature of our thoughts, and the thought patterns that drive our behavior for good or ill, we see that we have a choice about which thoughts to follow and which to let go of.

3. Trying to Have Only Positive Thoughts

On the flip side, many people have the misconception that if we do have thoughts during meditation, they should be positive, wholesome thoughts. “I must be a terrible meditator,” people say, “because I have so many negative thoughts in my head!” Since many of our thoughts are based on a negativity bias in our brains and distorted habitual thinking from our personal histories, ruminative and unpleasant thoughts are very normal. They are a part of being human. And when we let those negative thoughts into our awareness, we are giving the fullness of our humanity its due. You are far better off knowing the judgments, biases, and fears inside your mind than not knowing about them. To know your thoughts rather than to judge them is a very helpful attitude.

4. Thinking that Being Calm is the Precondition for Practice – or Its Goal

Over the years many people have told me, “I couldn’t meditate this week because things were really frantic. I just wasn’t relaxed enough.” Or, “I was so agitated when I tried to sit that I knew it wouldn’t do me any good.” Etc. People have the idea that they need to get rid of all the negative stuff before practicing. But if we waited for things to become perfect before we meditated, we would never meditate! In addition, many people believe that their practice is a failure if they don’t feel relaxed at the end of it. “Isn’t being calm the goal?” they ask. No, actually. The goal of meditation is to be present for what arises without needing to change it or fix it. If you sit for 30 minutes with your anguish, doubt, anger, or fear, you will become very knowledgeable about the forces driving your behavior. You will also have cultivated patience, insight and self-compassion. If you sit with your negative states long enough, your relationship to those negative states – and the states themselves – will start to change.

5. Believing that Frequent Loss of Focus is a Sign of Failure

When you go to the gym, every time you do a rep with a dumb bell you are developing the strength of your muscles. It’s the same with meditation. Every time you notice you have lost your focus and then come right back to your breath, you are doing a mental rep which increases the strength of your mindfulness. So instead of thinking that you are a bad meditator because you frequently wander away from your object of meditation, take it as a sign of success that you keep bringing your mind back. They call it meditation practice for a reason.

6. Not Making Adjustments When Conditions Change

Your meditation practice is alive. It reflects the conditions of your life, your world, and the changing nature of your body, mind, and heart. Just like life, a meditation practice is something that evolves over time. It isn’t static. It lives. What worked for you for the last year may suddenly stop working for you now. What happens then? For years I knocked my head against the wall by counting my breath when it wasn’t effective for me. No one had told me there were other things I could do besides count! I finally figured it out and realized that my practice was a vital, growing thing. One of the things that makes meditation practice an art is that you need to use your intuition to determine how to work with changing experiences. Conversely, some people make the mistake of changing their practice too often. Getting bored with something they’re trying then moving on at the first sign of difficulty. Your own judgment and inner knowing, and the advice of skilled teachers, can help you stay the course when you need to, and try something else when that’s what’s needed.

7. Believing Your Boredom

Meditation is the act of sitting and being with ourselves and noticing how things are and what’s going on. A big part of this is the willingness to be curious about our experience. People have often told me that they hated doing this or that practice, because “It was so-ooo boring!” I always tell people that if you are experiencing boredom, get interested in it! Often beneath boredom there are other emotions, like doubt, anger, and fear. Boredom is a great way of putting a veil over our wounds and keeping us from knowing ourselves. You don’t need to change your boredom per se, but try not believing it either. If you stay with your boredom long enough, treasures will be revealed.

8. Beating Yourself Up

Being kind to yourself and practicing self-compassion is the most effective way of sustaining a lifelong meditation practice. Because meditation reveals the messiness of our all so human lives, it takes great courage, patience and self-care to endure it all. If we beat ourselves up, we’ll stop practicing. If we care for ourselves with an open heart, our practice will serve us for life.

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A Cure for Toxic Rushing

rushing-aboutRushing about seems to be the default way we live our lives. Interestingly enough, because we often rush ourselves, it’s hard to notice when other people rush. But during those times when we are more relaxed, or forced to stop, the signs of rushing are everywhere. On our roads and freeways, at work, in stores and on sidewalks, people seem to have just one speed. The speed of doing things fast. In fact, it can be quite jarring to see someone moving slowly, so accustomed are we to moving at a certain pace. How many times have you been parked at a red light and, as the light turns green, someone slowly crosses the street in front of your car? Chances are that was not a pleasant experience for you.

The problem with rushing is that it isn’t an effective way of being in the world. When we rush we are far more likely to make mistakes, to get into an accident or hurt ourselves. Rushing also means that we are more likely to be in a bad mood, to be angry, fearful or upset, and more likely to be on autopilot and make bad decisions. Rushing also makes it difficult to have a meaningful conversation, to establish intimacy, and it tends to stifle curiosity and the open-hearted attitude of beginner’s mind. Learning is very difficult when we rush. In short, when we rush we are far less likely to experience the joy and richness of being alive.

But the outward signs of rushing are not as important as what is happening inwardly that gives rise to the rushing. And inwardly is where we need to focus in order to stop our rushing. When we rush about physically, most likely a part of us is feeling impatient, or angry, or afraid, or agitated, or desirous, or confused. More than anything, rushing is an internal state of disconnection from ourselves. The following story from my own life illustrates this.

Once I was facilitating an all-day mindfulness training for a corporate client. It was an 8-hour day filled with lots of didactic material presented in PowerPoint and included periods of silent mindfulness practice. But since the day was for beginners, the meditation instructions I gave were quite detailed. So essentially, I was speaking pretty much for the whole 8 hours. Things started off well that morning, but about an hour before lunch, as I was in the middle of a sentence, I noticed that I was suddenly feeling light-headed and queasy. Within seconds I began to feel weak, shaky, and I started breaking out into a cold sweat. It felt like the room was about to spin. Like I could collapse right there in front of the class participants! I sat down and tried regrouping, my energy flagging. I imagined being carried out of the room by earnest paramedics while the horrified class participants watched me with dismay.

I got through the next few minutes and then we came to a break. I left the room and went into the bathroom and entered a stall. The first thing I did was sense in to my body. I noticed that my chest was feeling tight and tense, my breathing strained and shallow. In that moment it hit me: I had been totally out of touch with my body all morning! That lack of awareness made me oblivious to the fact that I had been speaking too quickly, and not breathing normally between sentences. The lack of proper breathing had made me light-headed and queasy. I had induced an artificial panic attack by being disconnected from myself and not breathing in the right way. I knew that I needed to slow down and that is exactly what I did. I returned to the classroom, paused frequently to notice my body and my breath during my presentation, and by lunch time I was feeling fine. In the end I completed the daylong training session as if nothing had been amiss. But I had learned a vital lesson. Because I knew the material so well I acted on auto-pilot and had forgotten to do the most important thing – which was to apply mindfulness to my own experience as I was presenting. As soon as I did pay attention to my experience, the symptoms went away. I had remembered to take care of myself.

Why do we let ourselves get into these states of disconnection that lead to rushing? Mostly because we have the habit of focusing on external things at the expense of what’s happening for us internally. We focus on the product, not the process. We owe it to ourselves to make sure that we are getting what we need in each moment. And this means routinely checking in with our bodies, our breathing, our mental and emotional lives, even in the midst of all the activity, the interactions, and the pressures of our day. When we do this, we automatically interrupt the unconscious rushing that’s been driving us. Instead of being obsessed with DOING things, we stay connected to our BEING, and our actions arise out of that being state.

It should be noted as well that there is a difference between rushing and doing something quickly. Sometimes we need to act quickly – but we can do that while still maintaining a steady, stable, unrushed awareness.

Appreciative Joy: An Intelligent Way of Being

When I was a younger man, I used to be something of a curmudgeon. I tended to envy people who were happy and successful. I remember times when, as a single man, I would glance at couples in San Francisco holding hands and feel bitter resentment. They seemed like such ordinary people, what right did they have to flaunt their happiness in my face by holding hands! Would love ever find it’s way to me? I’d wonder. Or I’d be walking down the street in a lovely San Francisco neighborhood, past gorgeously cozy Victorian mansions, and feel like a total failure in life because I didn’t own such a beautiful house. I’d feel the same way about people driving fancy cars, or going on long and expensive vacations to exotic climes. Or about so many other things.

Couple Holding Hands at Sea Sunset

Then something strange started to happen. I started catching myself smiling at beautiful houses as I walked past them, feeling genuinely happy for the people who lived in them. I also began noticing a swell of enjoyment whenever I saw couples holding hands, being openly affectionate. And when people told me they were going on long expensive vacations, I would be sincerely delighted for them.

One day it hit me: I had stopped being a curmudgeon! But what had changed? I asked myself. Then I realized: my meditation practice, which I’d been engaged in for many years, had started to show up for me as the heart quality known as appreciative joy. Appreciative joy, sometimes known as sympathetic joy, is that quality of an open and wise heart that rejoices in the happiness and success of others. When it is directed at one’s own good fortune, appreciative joy is embodied in the emotion of gratitude. What was amazing to me is that I hadn’t consciously tried being grateful for what I had or appreciative of others’ happiness. The emotions just arose naturally as a result of my practice. I realized as well that if I was spontaneously experiencing joy for others, my brain must have been changed as a result.

Through meditation, we practice letting go of distractions, comparisons, and private obsessions again and again, by simply coming back to our breath or whatever object we’re focusing on. That act of letting go and coming back, repeated countless times over hours, days, weeks, months, and years, has a structural impact on our brains, thanks to neuroplasticity – the fact that our brains can be changed through repeated experience. Those structural changes are then reflected in our behavior. The hard edges of our comparing and judging mind soften, and we gravitate towards a state of inner contentment. When we are feeling good about ourselves internally, we don’t have to compare ourselves to others externally. Feeling good about ourselves, we naturally wish others to be happy as well. If we feel inner joy, it frees our heart to feel joy for others.

And research has shown that joy and gratitude can have a protective influence on psychological and physical health. In one study by Emmons & McCullough, those who kept weekly gratitude journals were more likely to exercise regularly, have fewer physical symptoms, and felt better about their lives as a whole. And research by Richard Davidson has shown a 50% increase in antibodies to the flu in people who rate high in joyful emotions.

Because of the fact that our brains are plastic, our curmudgeonly tendencies don’t have to be our fate. We can intentionally cultivate positive states like joy and gratitude through practices such as mindfulness, concentration, and lovingkindness. We are not at the mercy of the brain’s default negativity bias or of our habitual ruminative thought patterns. In a very real sense, happiness, joy and gratitude are ways of being rather than static states. And because feeling appreciative joy also makes us a better colleague, leader, friend, or spouse, a joyful mind is also an intelligent one.