From Stillness to Spaciousness: A Different Approach to Meditation
Meditators I meet often struggle with cultivating stillness in their practice. They ask me, "How do I become more still? How do I cultivate stillness?" Sometimes people say, "I don't feel still," or "I don't feel like I'm connecting to stillness or calmness." So, based on this common question, I just wanted to share some of my thoughts, some of the ways I work with meditation, and hopefully give you some new approaches.
Within the Buddhist traditions, we would say, generally, that stillness is a preliminary for deeper levels of awareness practice. So, stillness is a requirement in some forms of Buddhist meditation. Yet, it can also become a hindrance. It can become this kind of trophy we're chasing that is misleading because what Buddhism recognizes is that the cultivation of stillness does not provide for full freedom or liberation. It's just a stepping stone, a tool that we sharpen that then we can use to develop freedom in the mind. So, I just want to put that out there right away. There's nothing wrong with cultivating stillness; it's just why do we want to cultivate stillness or a sense of calm?
I think sometimes in the modern meditation world, we get a little bit obsessed with this. We get a little bit hyper-focused, thinking, "I need to be still and calm for meditation to be working." I don't agree with that. I agree that stillness and calm are tools that we can then use to develop Insight Meditation and deeper forms of practice that actually liberate us. But I don't agree that stillness is a mark of our meditation working or not. So, rather, I recommend cultivating spaciousness.
So, what spaciousness looks like is a practice of awareness. It looks like centering this quality of the mind that can be watchful, that can bear witness to thoughts, emotions, sensations, and all of our sensory experience. And developing that through meditation, developing that by connecting to awareness, first by maybe cultivating a little bit of stillness and then looking at the mind, seeing, "Who is it that's watching? What is it that's aware? What is it that is present with whatever I'm seeing, be it a thought, a sound, a sensation, something we're feeling, or all of it!"
So, it's this aware quality of the mind that will set us free. It's this aware quality of mind that, when we're able to connect with a more spacious awareness, we're able to not only be present with what's arising but to also see that it's not self. It's that function of seeing that it's not self or it's not, sometimes we say, truly existent in the Mahayana Traditions. It's that sense of “seeing” that directly, experientially, sets us free, because then we don't have to be under the control or bondage of every emotional reaction that arises or of every thought that arises. And this is also a process. It's not like we immediately recognize that and then we're free. No, this is a process. It's like if we think of this as a chain, like link by link, we undo it. That's how it works for most of us.
But stillness itself won't undo any of it. It just freezes everything. So, the more we cultivate stillness, the more we're able to enter this experience that's calm and open, but everything's frozen. It's not that we’ve liberated ourselves from emotional reactions and thoughts. It's that we've temporarily put them on pause. We've frozen them, and that can give the illusion that we are free. So, this is where the danger of stillness comes. Some people might think, "Oh, I've attained it. I've done it." And like I said, it's just temporarily putting things on pause. The moment you lift your finger from that pause button and hit play, it's going to flood back.
So, this is why we say, at least in the Buddhist lineages, that the cultivation of Insight or Wisdom is more important. Not that stillness isn't important. Like I said, it's a tool. But that Nondual wisdom, that experiential level of wisdom, which I'm calling spaciousness, needs to develop. And so, I find when we're centering awareness in the practice, this happens a lot more naturally and smoothly, depending on the person. But for me, it really helps because I'm not really centering whether there's stillness. I mean, within awareness, sometimes the mind can be still, but sometimes it can be moving, meaning thoughts are arising.Over time, we start to allow both stillness and movement.
Stillness is fine. There's nothing wrong with it. The problem comes when we require it and get too attached. So, if we're not attached, it's fine. But we can get into trouble when we prefer it over movement. Movement just means thoughts. When we practice awareness, awareness is just this space that anything can arise in. We're talking about this aware quality of mind, not aware of something specific.
People have different names for it in English. Anyways, when you touch it, you know what it is because you can experience it. It's a sense of spaciousness, like a room or a field or theater where anything can arise, but we're aware of it. We don't have to join it. We can join it if we want, but we have a choice. Awareness offers the possibility of more free will because otherwise, we're just being conditioned by the thinking mind, by our emotional reactions all the time.
Now, again, as I said, stillness can lead to spaciousness, but sometimes spaciousness can become its own ideal or we can become attached to spaciousness. We might connect with some sense of openness and think, "That's it. That's spaciousness." And then we kind of grab it and try to hold onto it. I don't recommend that either, obviously. It's more about a sense of welcoming. It's not a conscious attitude of holding onto something. It's more like an experience where everything's welcome, where we can let be with what's arising via awareness, and everything's welcome to move, everything's welcome to come in or go out.
There's a famous quote from a Zen master, Suzuki Roshi, who said, "When you practice meditation, leave all of your windows and doors open. Anything can come in and out. Just don't serve them tea." So, it's a really nice quote. We don't try to block anything. We're aware of the thoughts and sense perceptions coming in and out of the “kitchen,” and we're also aware that we don't want to proliferate them by serving them “tea.”
So, slowly through this, we start to find pockets of freedom where we recognize that emotional reactions, thoughts, etc., are not the self. They're arising within awareness, but we personalize them less and less. For me, this becomes such a vital part of meditation. It becomes the freeing aspect. And then, of course, if this is interesting to you, there are lineages and paths of practice for this. For instance, in the Mahamudra traditions of Tibetan Buddhism, they have practices for beginning and developing this kind of thing.
So, for some of us, I recommend that. For others, just starting with a practice of open awareness, which is a practice that includes stillness but emphasizes not blocking thoughts and perceptions can be incredibly beneficial. Sometimes we call this Shamata or calm-abiding practice without support.
Shamata without support just means we are not using an external or internal anchor for the practice. Instead, we just center awareness, and then we don't block. As long as we don't lose awareness, that's meditating. The moment we lose awareness and get distracted into a process of thinking, etc., that would be distraction. We recognize that and come back to awareness. Working with that can be a really good start.
