Finding Confidence In Your Meditation Practice
During a recent one-on-one session, one of my regular students opened up about their growing uncertainty in their meditation practice. There are many reasons we can lose confidence in ourselves or our practice over time. Some of this happens when we lose consistency, and some happens because we think we should be "getting somewhere" that we imagine is the place to get—and when we're not getting there, we feel we're not good at it or it's not going well. Of course, there can be other reasons as well.
This conversation really affected me because, as we were sharing the various reasons for their struggle, some of it related to what I just mentioned, and some of it was in the area of having problems with consistency in regular, everyday formal meditation practice. They were also just not feeling "juicy" in their practice, experiencing a lot of boredom and stagnation—like they weren't getting anywhere.
I really felt for this person's predicament because I see them often, I care about their practice, and it's my job to help them. But beyond that, something really resonated with me in my own personal practice. I've been able to work with formal and informal meditation practice for almost 25 years now, and I've gone through so many ups and downs, so many different phases of practice. It's like any relationship—sometimes I'm in love with it, and sometimes I would rather do anything else than meditate.
I remember distinctly about five or six years ago, I was in one of those down phases and getting frustrated with my practice. I wasn't getting the experiences I wanted or developing in the way I wanted to develop. Then a light just went off—and of course, this was influenced by my personal teachers and their wonderful, ongoing advice. The light bulb moment was realizing: why am I making this about an experience? Why am I getting so focused on how I should feel in any given meditation practice?
The next question that came was: what do I focus on? Obviously, for most of us who meditate regularly or semi-regularly, there's some kind of practice we're working with, some kind of technique. For people a bit deeper down what I call the "Buddhist rabbit hole" or in various Buddhist spiritual traditions, there are specific practices. But beyond that, what I really centered on was effort.
What I could do here is relate to the practices I work with on a daily basis, just show up and put in effort. This is something I've been trying to do for a long time—sort of focus in that way—but it never really clicked until I just got exhausted with constantly seeking another kind of experience than what I was actually feeling and experiencing. Like I said, it was a light bulb moment: why don't I just sit down and put in effort, and do that in a sustainable way?
If I'm going to meditate for 45 minutes or an hour, it doesn't mean I have to put in an hour of very intense effort. Instead, I can put in pockets of effort throughout that hour, and if I'm feeling like it's getting tight, tense, or I'm over-efforting, I can just relax for a minute. I don't have to get up—I stay on my meditation seat but just relax for 30 seconds or a minute.
This really changed my practice because it goes back to right effort in the eightfold path, but it also relates to one of the six paramitas we practice in Buddhism: joyous perseverance. When you actually study the paramita according to Buddhist scholars like Shantideva, it breaks down into other factors. We need to keep our perseverance, and we need to keep our joy in practice. One of these factors is rest—actually knowing how to rest or knowing when to rest.
For some meditators who are very advanced, maybe they can go three or four hours in a meditation session, then actually take a break, get off their cushion, and come back, and it's fine. I'm not there, and I'm guessing if you're reading this, you're probably not there either. (If you are, congratulations!) For most of us, we're doing a shorter session—one to two hours, or even 30 minutes is fine—and we might need shorter breaks within that longer session. Again, this doesn't mean having to get up and get a coffee; it just means we're sitting and we just kind of relax a little bit.
For me, finding more confidence in my practice has been related to finding the right amount of effort in a session and really emphasizing that—not emphasizing the results or the experience or what I should be feeling. Over these years since I made this shift, it's still a conscious thing every time I get to the cushion. I have to remember that it's not automatic. I have to remember: okay, you're here to put in effort, that's it. You're here to put in effort with a motivation of compassion, sometimes what we call bodhicitta in the Mahayana tradition, and that's it.
Anything that happens is part of that process. If I'm in a certain mood or dwelling on something that just happened in a conversation or interaction with someone, or just a past experience, that becomes part of my practice. Not in the sense that it takes me away from practice—it just gets included. The effort is in watching the mind, looking at the mind, learning about that particular emotion or mood, or learning how to approach that mood or emotion with more compassion and wisdom.
Since I've shifted this approach, it has really changed how I feel confidence in my practice. I don't feel confident in an individual meditation session or what I'm getting out of it necessarily that morning or that day, but what I do feel confident in is that I'm pursuing a path. I'm pursuing regular effort in a set of practices for bringing about the view of the particular path that I practice, which happens to be Buddhism.
Through that, of course, practices grow over the years. We learn more about ourselves, we learn more specifically about how and why we struggle or experience suffering and dissatisfaction, and we also learn how to not do that as much. I think this is important—it's like learning that if you're putting your hand in a fire, maybe don't do that as much. Often, we're doing this through our behaviors, actions, and relationships, but also through the way we poise ourselves or the way we stand or sit in relation to a given moment or experience.
What I mean is that meditation is a very internal process. When we're growing awareness and mindfulness, we're growing our ability to work with things in the moment where we don't have to get so stuck. We don't have to feed into more aggression or more clinging. Of course, clinging and aggression happen—we need to be flexible with ourselves—but generally, we see some kind of approach where there's a loosening over time.
For most of us, this is quite slow. For me, it's very slow, and I'm just sort of accepting that. From that loosening of how we relate to states of mind or emotions that are causing constriction and pain, from some opening of that, we also start to find confidence in our practice. Confidence is in the effort, in just showing up and putting in effort—I recommend that—but there's also confidence in these little moments of mini-freedom.
They might not be the big freedom of Awakening yet for us, but we need to take joy in these little moments. We need to take stock of these mini-freedoms we can have because of our practice, and that's the development of genuine confidence.
Some of my teachers, who are much further along in their embodying of the Dharma and awakened mind and potential—one thing I often notice is their humility. It's not an arrogant kind of confidence, but there's a confidence that they know how to be free. I don't mean free like wild and party—obviously, I mean internally free in relation to their emotions and thoughts, and how they work with themselves and others.
That's a big deal. When I noticed that—and it's not always obvious, you kind of have to observe someone carefully, not in a skeptical way, but you really have to watch them—you can see that this person isn't getting stuck. We can see when someone gets stuck, and maybe some of that is our own perception, but we can also see when someone's repeatedly not getting stuck. From what some of my teachers have shared, this is what genuine confidence starts to look like. It's not that we become this big spiritual person—that's an ego trip. Instead, we internally know how to be free.
To recap quickly: The first confidence we want to look for is really just putting in effort, not worrying so much about what we experience or if we think it went well or badly. Just dedicate a certain amount of time to your practice each day, both formal and informal. Informal means throughout the day in small moments; formal means in your laboratory, quiet in your room, or whatever space you have, for however much time you can dedicate. We grow confidence in the consistent effort we're putting in.
From there, we can start to grow confidence in these little mini-freedoms. We can start to notice where we're able to loosen a little bit—loosen our clinging, loosen our aggression—in relation to ourselves, others, and the whole of life. Through that, we can eventually start to taste wider freedom.
