Good & Bad Meditation

Can you remember when you first came to mediation? You had all these expectations of what it would be like when we were a “meditator.” You would experience a quiet mind. You would be calmer. You would be able to handle whatever came our way with patience and equanimity. You would develop a better understanding of the world, seeing why things were the way they were. You would understand the secrets of the universe!

So, you started practicing and, as it is with most of us, you experienced some or all of these goals: your mind started to quiet down, you felt calmer and more patient with whatever arose during meditation, you seemed to have better understandings of the world. These were Good meditations.

Then things changed. Your mind wouldn’t quiet down. You sometimes felt agitated during practice and couldn’t settle down. You lost any sense of balance and equanimity. Whatever you thought you understood about practice seemed to have evaporated as your emotions took over and you couldn’t get back to the “Good Place.” These were the Bad meditations.

Now, if you found the perseverance to stick with it, the pendulum usually swings back and you could settle a bit better and have some Good meditations. If not, then perhaps you dropped practice altogether, maybe to come back to it weeks, months, or years later. Or maybe not at all.

You need to know that this is my story, not yours. And I came back.

Your story may be similar in some ways, but the one thing in common is that we all had “expectations” when we started practice. You wanted something in your life to change, or you never would have picked up that book, or gone to that class, or went to a lecture with a friend when you knew it was just going to be a waste of your time. These expectations became our goals and we judged our practices by how we achieved them, or failed to achieve them. Good Meditations & Bad Meditations.

In the West, we are often focused on accomplishments and achievements. The only way to know if we have achieved the desired result is to compare our experience to the goals we set when we started the project. When we use this model to judge our meditation practice, we set ourselves up for disappointment and failure. Practice never moves in a straight line toward a goal. So, how can we change our attitude about practice to avoid disappointment in our practice?

The “trick” is to see practice as a Path, not a Goal and the act of meditation as a process, not a state. We need to approach our practice as the continual “returning to the path” each time we notice the mind has wandered away. If we view meditation as the practice of returning our mind to the present moment, then each distraction we experience offers an opportunity to return to the path, again and again.

If you choose not to return to the path of practice when you notice you are distracted, then you have just stopped practicing. There is no good or bad to this. You have just chosen to continue your worries, or daydreams, or fantasies rather than continuing to meditate. It is a choice. Most of the time.

When you choose to return to the present moment or object of focus in your practice, then this is Good Meditation! It is good practice whether the present moment experience is pleasant, unpleasant, or just neutral or boring.