Meditation isn’t meditation without these five things
I used to think meditation was a chore. Now I could do it all day.
After a princely and sheltered upbringing, during his late twenties, a guy called Siddhartha Gautama encountered “Four Signs” that changed his life forever.
Despite already having all the food, women, servants, and entertainment he could ever want, the fact was, Siddhartha was bored, restless, and utterly dissatisfied.
So, one day, when he was 29 (under the shadow of the big three-zero), he decided to get one of his drivers to take him for a ride into the city.
It was on the drive there that he encountered his first life-changing sign: a hunched-back, weary, grey-haired and most likely miserable old person who was worn and weighed down by the passing of time.
Freaked out but nonetheless intrigued, he went out to the city again the next day. To his dismay, this time he saw a sick person with bloodshot eyes and pale skin, rolling and writhing on the ground as if possessed by some demonic spirit.
Scared out of his smooth and nicely tanned skin, the next day, he ordered his driver to take him out again. What was awaiting him this time was a dead person, still and lifeless and surrounded by mourners who were weeping and wailing their hearts out.
For sure he wasn’t bored anymore. Wondering what other horrors may be out there in the world, he went out for a fourth time. But this time, he encountered a young person with nothing but a robe and a bowl, standing in the dirt barefoot, radiating out a sense of peace and tranquility.
These four signs are said to be what kicked off the journey of the man who was later to become known as “The Buddha”, a term used to describe “an awakened one”.
Whether or not things actually played out that way and in that exact order is arbitrary. The parable serves as a potent reminder of how easy it is to go through life ignoring or simply being unaware of certain facts that are fundamental to existence. Crucially, it also points to the fact that it is only possible to find true peace and liberation by actively embracing the seemingly ugly, disagreeable, and negative parts of life.
Like Siddhartha’s palatial upbringing, the modern world tries to keep the icky sides of life like aging, illness, and death hidden in the dark corners as if they didn’t exist.
Therefore, unless you want to be like a young Siddhartha and live an unfilling existence and remain out of touch with what’s really going on in the real world, it’s necessary to regularly and consciously bring your attention to the things in life that so often go overlooked.
Meditation is about recollecting your attention and remembering what is here now. But when you’re programmed to forget and avoid and ignore, often just sitting down and meditating is not enough.
Like Siddhartha and his drives into the big city, it takes directed and skillful effort to venture out into the scary, unknown parts of life, and a willingness to open your experience up to whatever life has to throw your way.
Over the years, I’ve created a habit before every time I meditate of consciously bringing to mind a few things that my mind typically—and passionately—likes to ensure I forget.
The five points are loosely based on the Four Signs and also the Three Marks of Existence—impermanence, suffering, and no-self—with a bit of a twist to make them fit for meditation and modern life.
By making remembering such cold hard facts of life a habit and a normal part of my meditation, it has allowed me to strengthen my curiosity muscle and go into the practice with a natural sense of vigor, balance, and curiosity, which otherwise might not be there.
Exactly how you remember these five things might be different for you, and may likely be different from one day to the next. The point, like Siddhartha knew after encountering the four signs, is to make sure you take a moment to remember them and to allow them to fuel your practice from here on out.
1. What it feels like to suffer
Everyone knows what it’s like to suffer, especially when in the midst of it. But still, not everyone remembers just how bad it can really feel.
It’s not that we don’t try. Gratitude is one of the go-to practices for appreciating what we have now and what it’s like to be without sickness or to have overcome ill health.
Such practices can work wonders. But too often they are used as a way to skip ahead and make yourself feel good — as a pleasing moment of recognition about the good things in life. What such practices are really about is recognizing and fully feeling the weight and difficulty of suffering, and then allowing a deep sense of gratitude to emerge as a result.
An often overlooked part of the Satipatthana Sutta, otherwise known as The Foundations of Mindfulness, is the practice of dwelling on some of these not so pleasant and not so sexy parts of life.
Now, I’m not going to suggest before every meditation you scan through the whole list of “bodily impurities” that it lists, including: your spleen, intestines, bile, phlegm, pus, blood, sweat, fat, tears, feces, grease, saliva, and urine.
But the intention behind the practice is an important one: to become more and more familiar with the parts of your body, and thus the parts of life, that you may normally consider as impure, nasty, ugly, unwanted, or that you otherwise tend to ignore.
One of the biases of the mind is that it has a tendency to forget just how bad things are. It’s why we continue to engage in unhealthy habits no matter how bad they make us feel, and why we often prefer to spend meditation not with the urgency of someone whose hair is on fire (as some teachers say), but half-heartedly while pondering over what we’re gonna have for dinner, how much work we have to do this week, and why we’re not meditating as enthusiastically as we should.
Another way to look at it is that you don’t fully remember what it’s like to suffer because the mind is too caught up in trying to avoid suffering. It thinks it has the power to ensure you forever avoid pain and difficulty and discomfort and live in a state of everlasting bliss. It’s quite happy to keep you in the illusion that life can be comfortable and free from all the unwanted parts of it, all you need to do is remain on the sofa with nothing but Go Eat and Netflix and not think too much about things.
“When we direct our attention toward our suffering, we see our potential for happiness. We see the nature of suffering and the way out. That is why the Buddha called suffering a holy truth. When we use the word “suffering” in Buddhism, we mean the kind of suffering that can show us the way out.”—Thích Nhất Hạnh
Although it can be greatly reduced, suffering is a part of life. It’s all around us — at every single turn and in every single place you look. This isn’t depressing: as Siddhartha taught, it’s the most liberating thing you can realize.
Denying the difficult and uncomfortable limits your view of the world and reduces your capacity to be able to face life head on. Opening up to see and face life in all its harrowing, painful, embarrassing, and traumatic glory, allows you to be free to experience the full beauty and range of what the world and life have to offer.
Before every meditation, I remind myself I’m not practicing denying difficulty or getting rid of pain. By meditating, I’m not trying to spend eternity in a state of placid bliss. I’m engaging in a practice of clear seeing and changing my relationship to difficulty, so that I can see it’s possible to live in a way that includes and embraces everything life has to throw at me.
2. You’re inching ever closer to death
In some places in the world, death is everpresent. You can’t go out of your house or talk to someone without thinking it might hit at any moment.
In the modern West, things are a bit different. Although we see and hear about The End in movies and on the news, in direct daily experience, it’s confined to a small part of society that’s frequented only a few times in a lifetime, or, if you’re lucky, only once.
Life and death go hand in hand. When you cut out death from your experience, you lose grasp of what it actually means to be alive.
“Do not go quietly into that good night, rage rage against the dying of the light.”—Dylan Thomas
A life without limit is a limited life. If not only for the simple fact that when you live a life that doesn’t include a conception of there being an end, you will always always always be able to find excuses and reasons not to do something.
There will always be reasons to put off that new project. Reasons to not ask that girl out. Reasons to not bring yourself fully to meditation. Reasons to not enjoy life and do all the things you want to do.
The mind loves reasoning. It will reason all day to the point that you never fully participate in life because “life” is a thing you’ve put on hold for a better day—a day when you don’t have a slight hangover, are not snowed under with work, and are not annoyed by that little niggle in your knee.
Reminding yourself that you’re going to die one day is not a magical remedy to use only when you need a spur of motivation. It’s a fact of life that permeates every single thing that exists and every single thing you do. It is merely being overlooked or forgotten.
Before every meditation, I remind myself of the interdependent relationship between life and death in any way that seems appropriate. Often the thought that this will all end one day alone is enough to shake me out of whatever haze I’m in and ensure I use the time wisely.
3. To be curious and question everything
Even though his talks were eventually transcribed and later dispersed to every corner of the globe, The Buddha taught not to believe anything unless you discover it is true for yourself.
In fact, questioning everything and discovering your own truth is arguably the most important part of The Buddha's teaching. And yet, uncoincidentally, it is also one of the most overlooked.
The mind loves to know things. It loves to know the time. It loves to know how long is left in an article. It loves to know what it likes and doesn’t like. It loves to categorize aspects of experience into neat little boxes. It loves to plan what to do and what not to do next. It loves to make sure it will find the pleasant and avoid the unpleasant.
The mind loves to know all this stuff because knowing means certainty and certainty means control. The opposite of these things, uncertainty and chaos, can be uncomfortable to say the least. It can even ensure you avoid experiencing these things by stating it knows what it doesn’t know and subtlety controllingly your experience of losing control.
Knowing is so normal that when it comes to practicing something like not knowing, you can easily fall into a passive state in which you pretend you don’t know a thing, including your name and how to meditate.
But meditation is not about denying knowledge and passively letting things happen to you. It is an active practice that is about exploring every aspect of your experience, including what you think you know and what you don’t know, with curiosity.
The only reason something is or isn’t so is because you think it. As such, you can’t un-think something or think your way through such a knowing—it only exists by the very thought of it. It takes an alert and curious mind to be able to first see and then watch such thoughts and judgments pass, as well as acceptance and non-judgment to be able to notice the assumptions and ideas and expectations that fuel your reactions and give thoughts their strength and substance.
“When we do not expect anything, we can be ourselves.”—Shunryu Suzuki
Every time I meditate, I remember, I can set an intention, but I don’t know what’s going to happen. I remind myself I’m not trying to know the truth or seek the answers to everything, but rather open up to see my whole experience, however it may be, and recognize the ideas and opinions that are standing in the way of what is already here.
4. What you’re trying to change or get away from
It’s easy for meditation to become a regimented way of finding some calm when you’re feeling a bit stressed out or to help you relax when you can’t sleep. These are pleasant side effects of the practice, but meditation is not about reaching these states—or any state or specific goal at all.
The full entirety of the instructions of meditation can be summed up in three words: being here now. The tricky thing is that “being here now” is not something you can do or achieve by sheer effort, motivation, or force of will.
On top of that, by trying to “be here now”, you are trying to make something happen and change your experience into something it’s not, and so, by definition, not “being here now”.
Being here now is incredibly simple but tricky because we live in a constant state of doing. Doing can be so normal to us that even when it comes to meditation, we approach it as if it was another thing to do, another task to tick off, another skill to master.
There’s nothing wrong with having aims and goals for meditation. The problem is when the practice becomes nothing more than a means of getting to these goals or wherever else it is you want to go. A mere bridge to changing whatever it is you are feeling and experiencing into something more pleasant or calmer or better than you perceive it is.
Just like life can never be free of at least some suffering, meditation isn’t about being free from discomfort. It’s about learning to be with it and recognizing the mode of doing, in which we are always trying to change things based on ideas about what we want or what we should or shouldn’t be experiencing, instead of just being with it and feeling what we’re feeling and accepting the constant flux of experience as it is.
“We are uncomfortable because everything in our life keeps changing — our inner moods, our bodies, our work, the people we love, the world we live in. We can’t hold on to anything — a beautiful sunset, a sweet taste, an intimate moment with a lover, our very existence as the body/mind we call self — because all things come and go.” —Tara Brach
Every time I sit down to meditate, I ask myself what am I wanting to happen, trying to change, or striving to get away from? One thing I can guarantee that will always come up is a sense of striving to be calm because I’m super stressed or I only have ten minutes to practice or I need to catch a train or go to work. Whatever it is, the key is remembering that meditation is not about trying to make anything happen, but simply being curious and aware as to what is already happening.
5. Finally: Remember to not take meditation and life so seriously
Meditation can seem like a pretty serious thing. It’s about sitting completely still and not making a squeak while exploring the nature of suffering and reality itself.
And it is serious in a sense. But not the sense that it becomes a kind of self-imposed military regime or a chore you have to endure before you can finally get on with your day.
Upholding this sense of seriousness is a mere symptom of living in modern society. Seriousness is ensuring we play by the rules, that we don’t step out of line, that we have a good pension plan, and that we don’t upload anything on social media that could damage our reputations.
Seriousness is a contraction against the fear of plunging into and being swept away by the unknown. After all, if we don’t take everything so seriously all the time, then we might lose our way, lose our humanity, we might get hurt, and worse of all, we might get funny looks from strangers.
But who knows what lies out there, in the unknown? It’s a silly question to ask, because you can’t know until you go there and find out.
And going and finding out sometimes means taking meditation and life a whole lot less seriously. You don’t get very far in life by sticking ardently to the well-trodden path. Well, you might get somewhere, but not where you need to go. To get where you need to go in life is about stumbling, getting lost, messing up, looking stupid, forgetting where you’re going, spinning around in circles, doing it all again, and laughing all along the way, so much that you forget there was anywhere else you needed to get to.
“Roads were made for journeys, not destinations.”—Confucius
And so, every time I sit down to meditate, I remember that I don’t need to take meditation and life so damn seriously. There is nowhere else I’m trying to get to or nothing else I’m trying to do other than being here now. That doesn’t mean I suddenly melt into a ball of goo; like a child running in the playground, energy, playfulness, curiosity, lightness, and joy all spring naturally when there is space for not having to be or do anything at all.
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