The most common response I hear these days when I tell someone I teach meditation is “I’m so stressed out. I could really use some of that.” I am also amused to hear fairly often “My friend should really meet you!” I’m happy to see that meditation is known more and more as something that could be directly helpful in our day-to-day lives. Anywhere stress plays a role in our problems, meditation can have a potential role in its relief.
Meditation practice need not be tied to any belief system. The only necessary belief is not a dogmatic one, but one that says each of us has the capacity to understand ourselves more fully, and to care more deeply both for ourselves and for others. Its methods work to free us of habitual reactions that cause us great unhappiness, such as harsh self-judgment, and to develop wisdom and love. Meditation gives anybody who pursues it an opportunity to look within for a sense of abundance, depth, and connection to life.
Meditation’s methods work to free us of habitual reactions that cause us great unhappiness, such as harsh self-judgment, and to develop wisdom and love. Meditation gives anybody who pursues it an opportunity to look within for a sense of abundance, depth, and connection to life.
Rather than an ornate, arcane set of instructions, basic meditation consists of practical tools to help deepen concentration, mindfulness, and compassion.
1. Concentration
Concentration steadies and focuses our attention so that we can let go of unhealthy inner distractions— regrets about the past, worries about the future, addictions—and keep from being seduced by outer ones. Distraction wastes our energy; concentration restores it.
Concentration is the art of gathering all that energy, that stormy, scattered attention, and settling, centering.
We often experience our attention scattering to the four winds. We sit down to think something through or work through a dilemma, and before we know it, we’re gone. We’re lost in thoughts of the past, often about something we now regret: “I should have said that more skillfully.” “I should have been less timid and spoken up.” “I should have been wiser and shut up.” We aren’t thinking things through to find a means to make amends. We’re just lost.
Or our distractedness propels us into anxiety-filled projections about the future. Imagine you are sitting in an airplane at one of the New York City airports. Suddenly you start thinking, “Oh no, I think this plane might leave late. I’m sure it will be late. Now I’m going to miss my connection. What will that mean? That means I’m going to arrive in Portland, Oregon, after midnight. There won’t be any cabs! What’s going to happen to me?” It’s as though Portland were famous for having people vanish if they land after midnight!
Without concentration, our minds spin off into the future in a way that isn’t like skillful planning but more like exhausting rumination. When I see my own mind beginning that arc of anxiety, I have a saying I use to help restore me to balance: “Something will happen.” There will be a bus. I’ll spend the night in the airport. Something will happen. I can’t figure it all out right now.
Concentration is the art of gathering all of that energy, that stormy, scattered attention, and settling, centering. Someone came up to talk to me recently when I was teaching, protesting my use of the word concentration. He said it reminded him of repression, as though he were squeezing his attention onto something, resisting and resenting anything else that came up to pull his attention away. I asked him if steadying or settling would be good replacements, and he happily accepted them. That’s what concentration actually means. It’s not a forced, tense, strained effort. It’s letting things settle on what is at hand.
2. Mindfulness
Mindfulness refines our attention so that we can connect more fully and directly with whatever life brings. So many times our perception of what is happening is distorted by bias, habits, fears, or desires. Mindfulness helps us see through these and be much more aware of what actually is.
Imagine you’re on your way to a party when you run into a friend who mentions an earlier meeting he had with your new colleague. He says, “That person is so boring!” Once at the party, who do you find yourself stuck talking to but that new colleague! Because of your friend’s comment (not even your own perception), you end up not really listening carefully to them or looking fully at them. More likely you are thinking about the next 15 emails you need to send or fretting as you gaze about the room and see so many people you’d rather be talking to. Everything this person is saying increases your ire and frustration.
But if you realize what’s going on, it might be that you drop the filter of your friend’s comment and determine to find out for yourself, from your own direct experience, what you think of your new colleague. You listen, you observe, you are open-minded, interested. By the end of the evening you might decide, “I concur. I find that person really boring.” But perhaps not; life also provides many surprises. What’s important is that we’re not merely guided by what we’ve been told, by the beliefs of others, by dogma or prejudice or assumption. Instead, we shape our impression with as clear and open a perception as possible.
Mindfulness does not depend on what is happening, but is about how we relate to what is happening. That’s why we say that mindfulness can go anywhere. We can be mindful of joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, beautiful music and a screech. Mindfulness doesn’t mean these all flatten out and become one big blob, without distinction or intensity or flavor or texture. Rather, it means that old habitual ways of relating—perhaps holding on fiercely to pleasure, so that, ironically, we are actually enjoying it less; or resenting and pushing away pain, so that, sadly, we suffer a lot more; or numbing out, disconnecting from ordinary, not very exciting experiences, so that we’re half in a dream a lot of the time. All these self-defeating, limiting re