The Cure
This is the third part in a series of posts about my experiences with depression and meditation. I reference a lot of terms and ideas that I explain in the two previous posts. If you’re not sure what I mean by the A&P, Second Path or the cloak of depression, you may want to refer back to the previous posts. The 2nd post in particular introduces lots of jargon that may be new if you are not an experienced practitioner or student of Theravada Buddhism.
https://brandondayton.com/blog/2020/1/22/crossing-the-threshold
https://brandondayton.com/blog/2020/2/5/wtf-just-happened
My previous posts have led me to an issue that is important to address. As a recap, I was a long time sufferer of depression, and then had a contemplative experience that seemed to eradicate the symptoms. While I’ve tried to be careful about how I’ve worded things and to not be too overly conclusive about any pronouncements of a cure, there is a clear implication within my first post. Inherent in any claim, is a prescription, and I will be upfront in saying that one of the explicit purposes of this series of posts is to recruit more people to the practice of meditation. That being said, I don’t want anyone to rush out with unrealistic expectations of what to expect. I’m reminded of one of my favorite clips from the Simpsons:
https://youtu.be/liiVX55tJ7E
I certainly don’t want anyone eating bees, whether metaphorical or otherwise, so I wanted to use this post to examine what I’ve experienced very closely, in hopes that I might minimize any misunderstanding of what I am saying about what meditation has done for me and what I would recommend for others experiencing depression.
Understanding how meditation has affected my depression is not easy, and it’s made me realize just how complicated all the various feelings we lump into the general category of depression really are. What got better, what is still there and what, of any of that, can I label as depression?
There is also the question of timeline and duration of effect. As I have expressed in my previous posts, my feeling immediately after crossing the A&P was that my depression was gone. I’ve used that way of describing the experience, because it is the most accurate and honest way to describe what I felt, but it’s important to point out something about that description: However honest I was in the description, I was describing what I felt in a singular, temporary moment. I could have just as easily described my first time using pot in the same way. To be fair, there seemed to be a fundamental shift in how I perceived things that was far beyond anything I had experienced with psychoactive substances, but still, for meditation to really have been of any benefit, or at least more so than getting high, I have to see what the enduring effects will be. What can I say about the state of my mood now (about 7 months post A&P) and what will I be able to say a year from now or further in the future?
I feel like I can break down the effects of my A&P into two pieces: What the experience gave me, and what it took away. As I have described before, the experience was accompanied by a powerful euphoria whose intensity I can only compare to something like the high from MDMA. The euphoria at that intensity lasted maybe 10-20 minutes, then dropped to non-MDMA levels. From there I experienced a gradual drop in the euphoria that stretched out over the next 2 to 3 months. During that time I was more energetic, everything was more pleasurable, I was more loving, more open, more emotional and more relaxed. If we were to examine a potential intervention for depression from a clinical standpoint, these effects by themselves would be impressive. Imagine that you took a pill, it gave you an MDMA level high, and then slowly, for the next 2 to 3 months faded away in its effects, and imagine that it came with no side effects (besides being annoyingly hyper about wanting to talk about the meditation). That’s what the A&P gave me. Clearly, however, there are more costs there than taking a pill. It was preceded by a certain amount of practice, I didn’t get to choose when the A&P would happen, and although it may be somewhat predictable that it will eventually happen with a certain type of practice, how and when it manifests can vary widely from person to person.
MCTB describes it this way:
There can be an extremely broad range of variability in the A&P, and so it is not possible to match perfectly anyone else’s description of it to what happens or happened to you. For example, timing can vary widely; it can go on for seconds or months. Intensity can vary widely; it can occasionally be subtle, but the general trend is for it to be very intense, high definition, and dramatic.
There is also what the experience took away. If I were to put my finger on one enduring change that I have felt since that moment, it would be a notable decrease in resistance. I like the way that Shinzen Young describes resistance as it relates to suffering (or depression). As he describes it, suffering is composed of two pieces: pain (or discomfort, or anything unpleasant) and resistance. When combined, they cause suffering, but the combination is not additive, it is multiplicative. So, if you had 10 units of pain and 10 units of resistance you would get 100 units of suffering. This feels like a very accurate description of my depression and how it functioned. It’s not the experiences by themselves that caused me distress, but my reaction to them -- specifically my difficulty in accepting things as they were. The upside of this formulation is that dropping resistance can significantly drop the relative sense of suffering. A drop in 5 units of resistance can lead to a drop in 50 units of suffering. A simple concept, but easier said than done.
Shinzen also uses the metaphor of resistance within an electrical system, which is a great way to visualize the problem. The less resistance there is in an electrical system, the more easily current flows, and the system works more efficiently. Just as with an electrical system, we function most efficiently when we allow sensations, whether pleasant or otherwise, to flow unimpeded. When there is resistance, it reduces efficiency. When there is a lot of resistance it can lead to catastrophic failures -- circuits melt down, flames erupt and no amount of blowing on the cartridge will make things right again.
This reduction in resistance is what keeps me, at present, from describing myself as having depression. The fireworks of euphoria, ease and energy are gone, but I still generally feel at peace with my life. My behaviors and compulsions haven’t changed significantly, although they are much less intense. Most days I have a hard time getting out of bed, and I am still distractible enough that I can end up wasting chunks of time in my day, but, I can honestly say that I am, in general, a happy person. Most of this I attribute to a dramatic drop in resistance.
Again, if we were to look at this from a clinical standpoint we are not only looking at a 2 - 3 month window of high energy and euphoria but an additional 3 - 4 months of what could conservatively be described as moderate to high degree of relief from symptoms. All without the side effects from drugs.
I’m curious to see how things unfold in the future. If the effects will fade over time, and how things change under stress are still open questions. There is a degree of reality testing that still needs to happen to get a better sense of the benefits, and this will likely be an experiment that will continue for the rest of my life.
Another question that could be addressed at this point is trying to sort out how much of the benefits I currently feel can be attributed to the A&P experience itself and how much of it is due to the practices that preceded it and those I’ve continued since then. How much was a one time change, with enduring effects, and how much of it will have to be sustained by continued spiritual hygiene in the form of meditation?
I can’t be totally sure, but it’s at least clear that the work I did previously made the A&P possible. My impression is that the work I’ve done since has also been crucial to where I am now. It’s like I got a layer of plaque cleaned off at the dentist, but I’ve gotta keep up the brushing and flossing to really keep my teeth healthy. Even if there were some effects of the A&P that were permanent and sufficient for a certain degree of happiness, it makes sense to me to act as if that were not the case. Resistance can come in many forms, and I have to be careful that in my exuberance in having found relief that I don’t create some story about having been “cured” of depression. I don’t want to become so convinced that I am happy now that I can’t be open to when I’m sad, or in pain, or feeling any number of difficult emotions. A certain amount of vigilance is in order to make sure that’s the case. In short, learning to drop resistance and go from the proverbial 100 units of suffering to 10 is an ongoing process. The A&P might have facilitated a more dramatic jump, but the day to day, incremental improvement is also key to making progress.
There is also the question of what other factors might have contributed to the experience as it unfolded. It’s hard not to attribute effects to events that were so dramatic and seem so unambiguously causal. It’s hard to ignore a smoking gun, but I do have to acknowledge that this didn’t happen in a controlled scientific setting where I was able to isolate all the variables. There was a context that accompanied the experience. My state of mind at the time was clearly the result of antecedents, including, but not limited to my practice up to that point.
As I have recounted, in late 2018, I experienced a pretty classical mid-life crisis that was highly distressing. One of my responses was to recommit to meditation practice, but I also invested heavily in therapy, particularly in marriage counseling.
At least the first half of 2019 was spent in weekly counseling sessions with my wife. I have to acknowledge as I say this, the feeling of vulnerability I feel to divulge a detail like this. There is a strong stigma associated with marriage counseling, and I have to be honest that I am sensitive to how others might read that. In general, when you hear about marriage counseling, it is like someone telling you that they found a melanoma -- a prelude to tragedy. Not that individual counseling doesn’t come with its own stigmas, but there is a unique reputation with marriage counseling that is loaded with much more doom.
The way I prefer to think about it is that our relationship was, on the balance, very good, but there were fragilities, that if not addressed, had the potential to cause a lot of unnecessary suffering. Maybe it was not on a melanoma level, but it was at least on par with appendicitis -- potentially deadly, but not a big deal if addressed properly.
In any case, the degree of distress I was experiencing was sufficiently motivating for myself and my wife to bring us to counseling. I won’t go into too much detail of the experience, but the general arc for myself personally was discovering the degree to which I was disconnected and dissociated from my emotional life.
I thought I was the one in the relationship that was honest and open about my feelings because I was willing to express my anger and frustration. With time, I learned that anger and frustration are surface level manifestations of deeper sublimated emotions. To return to my metaphor of the cloak of depression, anger and frustration are all that can get through when everything else is so deeply buried.
We would come to places within our sessions where we would get past the anger and would explore areas of personal vulnerability, and I would have this blank, Data-like expression on my face. It would feel like I should be feeling something. I could recall at some past point in my life having a salient emotional response to the issue, but I would sit there blank-faced and befuddled.
With time and work, I found the ability to open up more authentically, and to do so with a loving partner that was nurturing a relationship of trust and safety alongside me. It was one of the best things we could have done for our relationship, and I found it to be deeply healing. I will be forever grateful to my wife for being open to doing the tough work we did in those many sessions. I know it was incredibly difficult for her, and it demonstrated immense courage, commitment and love. These sessions played a large role in making me aware of my own emotional numbness and it’s likely they played a role in preparing me for the opening I would later have at retreat.
I also have to acknowledge the role that my individual therapy played as well. There was much I could say about how these sessions benefited me, but most crucially, they helped me to find a moral grounding with which to move forward with my life. In short, they kept me from making some really dumb decisions.
From MCTB:
It is also helpful to understand that training in morality will help us when we get to formal meditation practices (the next two trainings in concentration and wisdom), providing a foundation of good mental and physical habits that can support those practices, as well as helping to avoid the mental and physical irritation that can result from a lack of a solid moral foundation. Thus, even if for some crazy reason, we have little interest in being moral because of the benefits it brings, if we are interested in obtaining the results of the other two trainings, we must also engage in training in morality.
As I pivot towards discussing what the potential benefits of meditation might be for others, and what recommendations I would generally make, I think this is a good time to make the point that the greatest benefits of meditation come when it is paired with other powerful modalities for increasing well being. I would include counseling in this, but I would also include working on morality, nurturing healthy relationships, and removing negative factors from your life.
Just as with the combination of pain and resistance, I believe that the combination of these factors are multiplicative or possibly even exponential. I’ve experienced first-hand how powerful it can be to develop a heightened sense of self awareness and acceptance and to then bring it into a session with a trained practitioner that can wisely and skillfully guide you in self-exploration.
I like the analogy of meditation and counseling being like exploring a cave. Meditation is like having the tools to skillfully navigate the cave -- like a headlamp to illuminate things and ropes and crampons to help you traverse the terrain. A good therapist is like a guide who knows the cave. It’s not hard to imagine how going without the proper tools or a good guide would each be exponentially more challenging but having them together would convert an otherwise terrifying and inaccessible space into a wonderland of discovery.
I believe this to be equally true with the other modalities I’ve pointed out. They are all interrelated and irreplaceable in their benefits. I would even go so far as to say that on their own, and unbalanced by the others, any of these individual modalities can be taken to an unhealthy level. In short, let me be the umpteenth person to reiterate that meditation by itself is not enough, and being a good person and possibly a happy person requires broad attention to various areas of human development.
That being said, meditation is a crucial and powerful tool for self-exploration and self-development, and of all of the modalities on my list, it’s likely the most misunderstood and underutilized in the process of personal development.
If I can do one thing of use in this post it would be to disabuse you of the association of meditation with the image of New Age yogis blissed-out in full lotus, or of meditation as some sort of spiritual Sanka you sip to start off your day right. If you crank open the valve wide enough, meditation has fire-hose like power to blow your mind. I’ve heard meditation masters describe basically being able to bring on any state of mind possible with psychoactive substances at will, plus many others not yet replicated in pill form. I’ve experienced some of this directly, and I am, *ahem* a noob. What meditation offers, that psychoactive substances do not, is a granular control (to a degree) of the effects. You may have the ability to open the fire-hose with substances, but meditation gives you control over the valve that a pill can not offer. Clearly, this should be reason for concern, just as much as reason for hope. An unskilled use of these tools can lead to a misdirection of the power in destructive rather than healing ways, but a responsible practice with good guidance can be beneficial, healing and liberating as well.
Which brings me to the question of whether or not I would recommend meditation to others that are experiencing depression.
The short answer is a strong “yes” but with a few caveats.
First, and most importantly, you should probably read this section of the foreword and warning of MCTB:
this book and the path presented in it are not for those who at this time find that they are unstable spiritual seekers. Meditation at the levels I am about to describe requires a baseline mental and material stability; and with respect to the latter, not necessarily wealth or even a 401(k), but ethically acquired requisites such as food and a safe, conducive shelter. You must have your psychological trip very together to be able to handle and integrate the intense techniques, side effects, and results I am about to discuss. In this book, I will explain in detail what is meant by “have your psychological trip very together”, with the key requisite skills being an ability to identify difficult mind states when they arise and handle them with kindness and aplomb.
My personal feeling is that meditation at high doses is what it takes to move the needle on well being, but it also can apparently lead to some potential issues of mental instability. If you still have some serious issues to work on, maybe sort those out first before you give meditation a try. Even if you do decide that you are mentally ready, understand that there is still a certain degree of risk. Be prepared to get help if you need it.
Second, there are many different reasons why people experience depression. I’m certainly not an expert on the various reasons why depression happens, and could only speculate on causes. The challenges you face and their causes could be vastly different than mine, and they may require different interventions. Different practices may be recommended for your particular challenges, and meditation in general may actually be contraindicated. So do your research, and maybe talk to your therapist or psychiatrist before you jump in.
Third, there is no guarantee that the particular spiritual attainments available via the practice of insight will lead to relief from depression. I’ve heard of some cases where mood disorders vanish after meditative attainments, but it doesn’t seem to be a consistent result. I know of at least one very advanced practitioner who was still taking antidepressants after having attained Second Path (to be fair, he also described himself as suicidally depressed before starting meditation, so it could still be seen as progress).
That being said, if my particular description of depression rings true to you, and if you find you suffer from depression but are an otherwise a responsible, stable person, then it might be a good fit.
Depression, Acceptance, Mindfulness and Mr. Rogers
To help you make that judgement, it might be good to review the particular qualities of my depression and consider how they might match up with yours. In my first post on the topic of depression and meditation, I spent quite a bit of time describing what my depression looked like. I thought it might be helpful to go into a bit more detail about how exactly the specific meditation practices I do are complementary to the particular way that I experience depression.
I also introduced the idea of the cloak of depression, and I think this is the best metaphor for understanding my particular brand of depression. To recap: as I experienced unwanted feelings throughout my life, I found various ways to ignore, dismiss, conceal or otherwise resist those feelings. With time, this created a habituated layer of resistance that protected me from the discomfort but also increasingly numbed me from feeling anything good.
The resolution to this error has been to learn to remove the coat, and the skill needed to remove the coat is acceptance. The idea is very simple and straightforward, if resisting unwanted feelings creates the coat, then accepting all feelings, whether good or bad, will remove it. Although the process sounds simple, carrying it out is a bit more nuanced and tricky to understand. How exactly, does one “accept” an emotion, or a sensation? I either feel it, or I don’t, right? And how is acceptance different than giving in? Should we all just accept the bullshit that’s making our lives miserable?
The first step to acceptance is mindfulness, a word that I am hesitant to use since it has become so loaded and diversely defined since it has entered the Western lexicon. In this case, I just mean awareness of what is happening in your mind and body at any given time. Kids are very good at this, as they haven’t yet built up the emotional defenses that dissociate themselves from their own emotions. When my kids are feeling something unpleasant, I ask them to tell me where they feel it in their bodies. They are very quick and clear about what is going and where. For grown-ups, it’s harder, which makes me have to reluctantly acknowledge the truth behind all of those cheesy stories where kids can see the magic thing and adults can’t. If you can get through Jr. High and still hear Santa’s Bell, count yourself lucky.
What you find as you start to pay attention to your mind and body, is that all sorts of obvious and not-so-obvious things are going on that keep you from seeing clearly what is happening -- there is resistance that arises in lots of different forms. Once you see the resistance happening, then you can start trying to figure out how to let it go, but just paying attention seems to be about 80% of the job. The rest of the equation involves some combination of relaxation, clear perception and concentration, all of which are developed through consistent, dedicated practice.
The meditation teacher Kenneth Folk is a brilliant innovator of pithy, simple approaches to mindfulness. One such practice he teaches is to ask yourself, “What is happening right now?” This can be done anytime, in any situation, but is particularly useful in difficult, uncomfortable moments. It’s best followed up with an investigation of where exactly feelings and sensations present in your body. Many insight practices are basically variations on this theme, repeated over and over again until you build new habits.
My personal spin on Folk’s practice is to do a bit of find-replace with the phrase. Any time I find myself asking the question, “What do I want right now?” or “What should I do right now?” I replace it with “What is happening right now?” I’d be willing to guess that 99% of neurosis share those little bits of faulty code in common, and if we could do a find-replace and insert WIHRN, we could untangle a lot of misery. There is usually some sort of discomfort and resistance that motivates questions like those. If we can stop and pay attention to what we are feeling and where, we can start to learn to accept the discomfort that drives us to want and to do, rather than hiding, concealing or running away from it.
This process reveals that there is a connection between mindfulness, acceptance and love, which is an incredibly important point to understand. The meditation master Dipa Ma was reported to have said that, “in my experience there is no difference between mindfulness and lovingkindness”. The moment you are able to see clearly what is happening and to be okay with it, you are developing love. Love is another loaded word, so I think it’s a good idea to explain the concept of lovingkindness here. Lovingkindness is a translation of the Pali word “metta”. My retreat teacher, Suzie Harrington taught that an alternate translation of metta is friendliness, which I really like. So when I say love, think about that friendly, Mr. Rogers type of love that is sweet and welcoming to whomever walks through the door. If you know my Dad, you can just imagine him, since he is a living embodiment of this Loving-kindness/metta type of love, but Mr. Rogers is a pretty good proxy if you don’t.
When you can experience something unpleasant and can be okay with it, you are learning to apply this type of love to your moment-by-moment experience. If you have trouble with it, you can bring that Mr. Rogers type of attitude to your experience. Can you be welcoming, open and friendly to what you are experiencing? It’s a powerful way of approaching difficult experiences. Practice saying, “welcome” to the hard stuff, or maybe, “Hi, neighbor.”
As you learn to be aware of and welcome experiences as they come, you learn to direct this love to yourself. If all of this stuff going on inside of me is okay, then I am okay. And this can then be extended out to every part of your life. Love then is not some type of singular focused emotion that you direct towards a chosen person, it becomes an experience that you cultivate at every moment. It radiates out to yourself, to your work, to others, to your life. Love becomes a way of engaging with life, and it increasingly comes without conditions. This is what happiness is. The corollary to this is resistance to everything you are, and everything you experience. It’s resistance to life, family and work. This is depression.
To be fair, there is a breaking point for everyone, a point at which things can get so unpleasant that it becomes impossible to open to it. I’ve hit that point many times in meditation sessions that got too uncomfortable or painful. Even for very advanced meditators, it’s a point of speculation of “how much could I be okay with?” Shinzen Young calls this the blowtorch test of enlightenment, but even if you are not able to endure months of vicious torture, an incremental improvement in the ability to be okay with more can be incredibly empowering. Over time, the idea is to gain the ability to be okay with greater and great degrees of discomfort and pain. Happiness then is no longer about creating ideal conditions, but broadening the conditions under which you can be happy. To me, this seems to be the most rational way to prepare for the inevitable pain of life, aging and death.
It also allows you to be a more reliably good person. There is a correlation between suffering and our ability to act in the ways we know are right. It’s just harder to be giving, generous and kind when we are in pain. If we can increase the conditions we can be okay with, we can increase the likelihood of acting responsibly in those conditions. This is more than just a philosophical musing. You can check with my wife, but the frequency of my dish washing has increased dramatically since the end of last summer.
Acceptance is vastly different than tolerating or enduring. I’ve spent the lion share of my life nurturing the endurance approach to difficulty. Years of saying, “If I can just get through this...” taught me that being miserable now was the price to pay for some future state of happiness that never arrived. Resignation may be acceptance on the outside, but is full throttle resistance on the inside.
Acceptance also does not mean being passive or disengaged in making your life better, or in trying to make a positive contribution to your family and community. There is the serenity prayer from the 12 step tradition: “Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” I used to think that this was incredibly difficult to figure out. How do you gain “the wisdom to know the difference?”
The problem comes from a confusion about acceptance of our moment to moment experience with acceptance of outward conditions. Knowing what is the right thing to do with your conditions in life starts with acceptance of everything at the experiential level. The paradox is that the most effective resistance to injustice starts with acceptance of what is.
Having said all that, It’s crucial that I emphasize that acceptance is not just a philosophical idea that once understood will untangle everything. Learning acceptance takes practice to develop, and from personal experience, I believe it requires quite a bit of practice in order to see a difference. How much practice, I’ll get into shortly, but if you are concerned about the potential commitment required, just consider -- depression is a contaminant -- like asbestos, or lead, or uranium-234. It infiltrates, permeates and suffuses everything it touches, until everything seems hopelessly ruined. Every sunny day, warm embrace, hard fought victory, invigorating discovery or courageous adventure. Every smile on your child’s face, taste of a new food, trip to a new place or act of true, heart-felt goodness. It all gets saturated and contaminated with this aching rot that conceals the bright, infinite abundance of life as it really is. Removing depression makes everything better. It makes everything massively better. When people ask me what is the best experience of my life, I feel like I should say my wedding or seeing my children born, but for me, it is the A&P experience I had at the retreat last summer, because it has made everything better. My memories of my wedding, or the births of my children, or any other of the many things I have lived are all better because I was able to remove the cloak of depression via meditation. Here’s the real kicker -- even the “bad” memories are better now. They all seem to be part of the story and are all part of what led me to where I am. I can look back and have a warm, welcoming feeling of gratitude about everything I have experienced up to this point. I have much yet to do and learn, but considering what I have gained up to this point, I can only be hopeful about the future.
This one decision, to start practicing meditation, has been the best decision of my life.
A Few Practical Thoughts on Starting a Meditation Practice
Lord of Caveats here. There are traditionally very high standards for someone being approved to be a meditation teacher. Within the Theravada tradition, the requirement is usually that the teacher have at least attained 2nd Path. I’m guessing it’s the same for Spirit Rock or IMS, but they do a good job of signaling the expectation without being explicit about the details.
I think there is good reason for this, as the basic instructions can be simple, but the specifics of experience can get very complex. Someone that has had first-hand experience with what can potentially happen can be essential in guiding your practice. I personally do not meet the traditional standards to be a meditation teacher, and I would be hesitant to work with a teacher that doesn’t demonstrate a high level of experience. This is problematic since short mindfulness certifications are becoming more and more common. If you just need someone to teach the basics of a practice, that’s fine, but I wouldn’t trust anyone that had completed a 30 day mindfulness course to give me any guidance on the particulars of what might arise during my day-to-day practice.
Personally, I feel confident enough to offer some good information on getting started, but I would recommend finding an experienced teacher if you are looking for real continued guidance. With that being said, here are my thoughts on starting a practice based on my own experience:
Many teachers in the West recommend doing something like 10-20 minutes a day of meditation. This makes sense, since they want people to actually do it, and if you tell someone that they need an hour a day to get the benefits, they just won’t start at all. I think 10-20 minutes a day is a great place to start, but if you really want to see the benefits of meditation, you’ll want to have a goal of working up to longer stretches of practice. When you start out, you are mostly just working off of faith. You have heard someone else extol the virtues of meditation and you are trying it out to see if it works for you. There is only so far you can go being motivated by someone else’s experience, and your first goal with practice should be to get to a place where you can start to see the benefits yourself, and be motivated by your own successes.
You can get this by having some good goals such as working your way up to longer sessions, and by making plans to attend a retreat as soon as possible. Retreats offer a couple of great benefits. First, they teach you that you are capable of sitting longer than 20 minutes at a time. After 5 days of sitting all day, a half-hour to an hour of practice at a time doesn’t seem as daunting. Second, retreats allow you to get deep enough into your practice that you have a chance of seeing some benefits.
As far as what duration of retreat to start with, I would recommend skipping day-long or weekend retreats and just jumping into a 5 day or more. I’ve only done 3 retreats, but the most difficult retreats for me have been the shortest ones. It takes a day or so to get settled into the retreat routine, and that adjustment period is usually pretty rough. You are getting adjusted to sitting all day and that is grueling for your body and your mind. When you do a day-long or a weekend retreat, all you are doing is the grueling part. Great if you want to practice accepting difficult sensations, but not great if you want to get to the point of having some positive reinforcement for your continued practice. That being said, there are other tough things that can arise at retreat, that I haven’t ever really experienced yet. So it’s not like you are guaranteed a smooth ride once you get past the first few days, but either way you’ll likely return with an emboldened view or your ability to practice.
Another good goal to keep you motivated in your practice is to work towards access concentration. In my opinion this should be one of the very first things that meditators are taught. It’s akin to learning how to dribble in basketball. As the name suggests, access concentration is a threshold of concentration that unlocks a wide range of other meditation practices, and it is a clear metric you can use to track your progress. And yet, I spent over a decade vaguely aware that something like that was necessary, but never encountering any explicit instruction on the matter.
There are a million different practices you can do, but the one thing they all have in common is that they will ask you to concentrate on something, and you will almost certainly lose concentration and get lost in thought. This will be how you spend most of your time at first, and it is actually a very important part of the practice. Realizing your are lost in thought, and then gently returning to your object of focus is how you build concentration. As you do this over and over again, as lovingly and gently as possible, you discover that you spend less time lost in thought and more time concentrating on whatever it is you’ve been told to concentrate on. If you can get to the point where there is a continuity of concentration, with a little bit of background thought -- that is access concentration. An additional upside of getting access concentration is that sitting becomes much more pleasant and sustainable.
If you decide to just do daily practice, do what you can to commit to an actual daily practice. If you have to choose between a long sit and daily practice, do daily practice. There is something about continuity of practice that you can’t get just from a giant sit one day. I’ve heard meditation compared to exercise in that sense. To make progress you need consistency and some rest in between sessions. Daily seems to be the best way to make that progress.
The other way to work up to larger doses is to do what the Transcendental Meditation guys do, Do multiple small sits throughout the day. The TM program is 20 minutes twice a day, which is a great place to start. 10 and 10, or 15 minutes, three times a day, would also be cool. If you can work your way up to 30 and 30, that’s great, and would get you in good shape for a retreat.
You can get even more ambitious, and it isn’t as difficult as you think. Although it’s not my standard practice, I’ve had many days where I was able to fit in two, 1-hour sessions in a day. I know others that are able to do 3 to 4 hours of practice a day. The more you see how powerful the effects of meditation are, the easier it is to dedicate time. Currently I am working with developing certain meditative states called Jhanas. They are enjoyable enough that I can easily spend an hour and a half at a time working with Jhanas. This is not to say that you won’t encounter difficulty that will take commitment and support to work through, but there are benefits to the commitment, and the benefits are well worth it.
This brings me to the importance of finding support for your practice. There was a time when humans were so naturally communal that it wouldn’t have been necessary for me to say this, but we now live at a time where we are so habituated to an individualized, solitary way of doing things, that I have to make an explicit point of emphasizing the importance of finding others that support your practice. Find a class to attend. Find a group to sit with. Find friends that are already meditating and share notes. Write blog posts about meditation and depression to recruit more friends to meditate with you. Share your practice with your family, so that even if they don’t decide to meditate, they can know it’s a priority and they can help make space to support you. Ask questions and keep a log on places like dharmaoverground. Do whatever you can to connect with others doing the practice.
I attend a weekly session because this is a simple, easy way to stay connected with other practitioners. The only effort I have to make is to show up. Meditation can be challenging and having a network of support (aka a Sangha) is probably the best tool you will find for getting through the tough moments.
As far as what practice to do, there are lots of great resources that I would just be copying and pasting if I were to include them here. I would check out Shinzen Young’s, See, Hear, Feel, Sharon Salzberg’s Real Happiness, Culadasa’s The Mind Illuminated or John Kabat-Zinn’s Full Catastrophe Living (the one I started with). People also seem to do well with guided meditation apps like Brainspace or Calm, but I recommend checking out some of the resources above once you’re ready to fly solo. Ping me if you’re interested in what each of these resources offers in particular.
So a good sample game plan for starting a practice would be to start sitting 15 minutes, twice a day concentrating on your breath, with a plan to slowly increase the sitting time to two, 30 minute sessions a day, and working towards access concentration.
Someone following a plan like this would have a good shot at reaching access concentration after a few months of practice and would be well prepared for a retreat. There’s also a good chance that by that time they would start to see the benefits of the practice.
There is a story from Mormon tradition of Nephi and the Tree of Life. As the story goes, an ancient prophet named Nephi once had a dream of finding a tree -- the Tree of Life. When he tasted its fruit, it was so transcendentally delicious that his first response was to do everything he could to share it with others. This is how I feel about what I have experienced with meditation. I have tried to be self-aware enough to balance that enthusiasm with some careful thought, and perspective. I’ve tried to share honestly and generously what I’ve experienced, and at the same time to acknowledge the complexities and problems inherent in my own subjectivity, and to the practice of meditation as a whole. These series of posts are the result of working through this process. I’ve made my caveats, but I want to be clear about how enthusiastic I am about the potential for contemplative practices to free people from lifelong suffering.
In the end, I want to be able to share something that has changed my life for the better, and do so in the most responsible way possible. I also want to find co-adventurers to join me in this journey. If you decide to take up a practice, or if you have one already, please let me know. The work I do on the cushion is second only to my commitment to my family, and I would welcome any companionship in the process.