Meditation is something which can take a long time to cultivate.
It can take between a few weeks and a few years to get the first tangible results and the process can either seem very easy or very difficult.
This, paired with the fact that many teachers do not like to share openly with new students about the goals and results of meditation makes it possible for new students to feel confused and unclear about what stage they are at and what they need to do next.
This problem, coupled with the problem of impatience so common among new students, can lead to the result that the new student begins to attempt to skip stages.
It is important to recognize here that there are many schools of meditation, and each one has a different basic method. Some of them are more simple and some are more complex. The method I practice for instance is fairly simple, but requires a certain amount of attention to detail and supervision so that new students don’t go off on the wrong track.
The current literature on meditation in the west is full of complicated ideas like “mindfulness” “chackras” “energy body” “third eye” “kundalini” “Qi” and many other terms and for people who do not have one teacher who teaches a single, proven method, it is easy to want to put all the ideas together and just invent ones own unique practice.
This is a tremendous trap in meditation and is genuinely dangerous for people who practice in this way.
A new student might be confused about why their teacher has simply told them to count their breaths, or to observe the space under their belly button and inside their body, or they might receive conflicting information from their friends or senior students who tell them to focus on different things.
This can make people very confused and it is important to first become clear about what the purpose of meditation is and then go about setting down the foundation required to achieve it.
The purpose of meditation is different at different levels of practice, but for new beginners and intermediate students, the most important purpose is to quiet the mind and calm the thoughts. No matter what style of practice you do, meditation should never make you excited or nervous, and if your practice is making you excited, it is a wrong practice, since it won’t allow you to calm down enough to begin perceiving reality and seeing what is directly in front of your eyes.
Meditation also requires an anchor, usually something to focus on such as placing the attention on a certain area of the body, or counting the breaths, or some simple visualization. The anchor is different in all styles of meditation but the principle remains the same, to draw the mind into silence and the body into stillness, calm and relaxation.
Meditation also requires you to relax and calm down your focus. If you can’t soften your focus, you will never become calm and silent, and the positive results of meditation will forever elude you.
Many new students, especially young people raised in cultures which prize the acquisition of goods as a measure of ones material wealth, often have a problem in sticking to the basic concepts of meditation long enough to learn the method correctly. They want to move from putting their mind in the lower abdomen to focusing on the third eye, to opening the heart centre, and allowing the spirit to move outside of the body, and they want to do it now. A wise teacher will try to help them understand why they should focus on just one thing at first. It is already very difficult to do one thing well, and in meditation, the goal must always return to the singular, because if you can achieve that one thing, then its effect in the long run will allow you to understand many things.
If meditation is used to stop the wandering of the mind, then you must stop the mind from wandering before you do anything else. Focusing on the energy meridians of the body, of out of body transcendental wanderings or anything else are all secondary to the base requirement of first achieving and maintaining stillness and silence. Any of the great effects of meditation come from that root and return to it, so if you can’t achieve it, then all other practices are futile imaginings and useless mental gymnastics.
It is much better to really learn the basics before trying to move on to more advanced material.
In order to avoid the illness of impatience, make sure you take the teachings of your teacher seriously and don’t deviate from the correct path they lay down for you.
January 18 2017
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