What Is Meditation?
Read the edited transcript below or watch it on YouTube here.
There are a lot of opinions and approaches to what meditation is. For the last 22 years I've been studying and practicing in the lineages of Tibetan Buddhism, and will share some ideas on what meditation is from those perspectives here.
When I first came across meditation in the year 2000 it wasn't really a household name yet. You could see the word “mindfulness” a bit in the public, but nothing close to what it is today. To go deeper into meditation at the time one mostly had to approach it from a spiritual or religious perspective such as Hindu-based meditation, taoism, or Buddhism. So after some searching around, checking out different books and a few meditative traditions, I eventually landed on Tibetan Buddhism.
Within the Tibetan Buddhist lineages there are some varying definitions that describe meditation. To simplify it for the sake of this article I will define meditation based on the Tibetan word Gom. Gom means to familiarize the mind with something beneficial.
From a traditional Buddhist perspective meditation is a mind activity, it's something we do with the mind. We use meditation to train in and familiarize the mind with various kinds of virtuous states such as loving kindness, compassion and awareness, the latter really being the actual root of meditation.
Awareness is an innate knowing quality of the mind that we are all born with but often do not recognize or strengthen. Strengthening it does not only form the root of meditation, but it can also allow us much more agency in our life when faced with challenging thoughts and emotions.
Awareness includes our ability to bear witness to our experience, to observe it, and to “see” it. For instance, meditation based on anchoring to the breath, or watching the breath allows us to begin to notice our habitual mind of thoughts and perceptions. Here awareness is not only our attention to breath, but the quality of mind that's watching ourself be attentive and present to the breath.
Normally we are completely lost in our thinking mind. When a strong emotion comes we get hijacked by it and we we suffer. We normally do not have much efficacy and flexibility with our thoughts, emotions, and habitual ways of being and acting.
As we become more familiar with the mind and how thoughts and emotions arise, we experience more agency within our perceptions and habits. We can also experience more joy, openness, and flexibility in how we live our life and move through the world.
So initially these are some of the benefits of cultivating meditative awareness, which is really the the first practice we train in. Here we are trying to bring all of the hyper-active, kind of out of control energy down, we are trying to settle the body and mind through the practice.
Over time we are able to access deeper spaces of being settled, of being present, and are able to sustain awareness for longer periods of time. In Sanskrit we call this practice of Meditative Awareness Shamata. Shamata can be with a support like the breath, a visualized object, or an external object, and it can also be without an object.
The second type of method(s) of meditation in Buddhism are connected to Insight Meditation or Special Insight. The Sanskrit word for this is Vipashana. Vipashana refers to a practice of being watchful of or investigating the nature of an outer or inner object or experience. Here we may practice watchfulness of the nature of a thought or emotion, or analyze how an outer object appears and exists. Through this kind of practice we start to pull apart or wear away at our fixed beliefs and how we habitually identify with a thought or emotion.
The purpose here is not to deny that something is happening, but rather to spark a shift in insight into how it actually exists, as we tend to exaggerate upon our perceptions and thoughts, and this in turn causes unnecessary suffering. So through insight meditation we are attempting to rectify the disparity between how something is appearing to us and how it actually exists.
Without some ability to abide in Meditative Awareness Insight Meditation is extremely difficult, as normally we are embedded with and overcome by thoughts. Sometimes the more we look at the mind, the more thoughts we see! This is of course normal in the beginning. Though if we persevere, we can settle hyper-active energies in the body, strengthen awareness, and prepare ourselves for the practice of Insight Meditation skillfully.
This is a short introduction to meditation from a Tibetan Buddhist perspective and is definitely not exhaustive. For more information please check out my library of Dharma talks and articles. Wishing you much transformation and joy in your practice.
