Why Your Meditation Isn't Working: The Four Missing Keys
These four keys are a distillation of common blocks I've observed in mentees and students over the years. They're common points of stagnation where practice can slow or stagnate. They're also common points of confusion where, when one of these elements or approaches is missing, people often wonder why they're not progressing in practice or what's going wrong.
They can help gauge what may be going on in our practice if we're feeling stuck or if something doesn't feel quite right. These elements can also help if we're not feeling the same energy in our daily practice.
I call these four key elements the Four C's: Curiosity, Conviction, Commitment, and Container. These Four C's are not necessarily linear, though I am going to present them in a more linear way here. Sometimes we're not missing all four; we may be missing one or two in our practice.
If you're new to meditation and Dharma, probably these four don't exist for you yet, or maybe they're in their infant stages. So, there's no need to overly judge or get frustrated if we find we're not including these four. It's natural that we come in and out of these four, but the whole idea here is that knowing about them, hopefully, we can be more proactive in including them and finding ways to include them in our practice.
The first one is Curiosity. I talk a lot about curiosity, and there's a reason for that. I think it's precious, vital, and valuable to our meditation and Dharma practice. I would argue it's vital and valuable to our approach in life, to learn to live life from a place of more curiosity.
Curiosity can mean a lot of things, but it primarily relates to cultivating an open mind. It also relates to inquiry work where we are asking more questions about our emotions, our thoughts, the world around us, than having answers or limiting judgments. Of course, depending on what we're going through at any given moment throughout our day, we need to apply discernment. So, I'm not talking about just being curious and leaving our discernment behind. Actually, I believe discernment is included in curiosity.
What I am talking about here is reflecting and learning where our limiting judgments are preventing us from growing, from maturing in our Dharma practice, or meditation, and our life in general. Curiosity allows for a more open mind. It allows us to live with more open questions as opposed to fixed beliefs and judgments. From living with more open questions and more curiosity, we can also find more creativity.
This also applies to our meditation practice, where often we're putting a form into practice. I'm not saying we need to necessarily be creative with a form. We can practice the form as it is, as we learn it. But creativity often comes in when we open to that form as an unfolding process, as a way to bear witness to our experience, bear witness to our thoughts, emotions, and reactions.
Being stuck to or a slave to our reactions is the least creative thing. It's the least creative way to live because we're just stuck, and we're just reacting. We have very little agency in that kind of situation. We're just sort of thrown about by our ideas, our beliefs, our judgments, and our emotions. Unfortunately, this is the state of a lot of our human predicament.
One of the purposes of meditation and Dharma practice is to open up this stimulus-reaction relationship where we start to be able to respond more from openness, compassion, and the wisdom of discernment. For me, this is where creativity comes into play because it's not that we're creating something new in our practice. It's that we start to enter the flow of life, and we find so much creativity, fluidity, and flexibility within that. This all starts with curiosity.
I alluded to it before, but curiosity also allows our limiting beliefs to take a rest, to take a break. As soon as a limiting belief comes up, it's like all the curiosity is gone. If we believe that limiting belief, if we cling to it, the curiosity is gone. The situation, the person, our perception of ourselves, a thought, an emotion, is just that. That is our worldview for that moment.
So, a big part of curiosity is opening up limiting beliefs. Instead of falling prey to a limiting belief and staying beholden or stuck to it, we ask questions, we inquire, we open up a process of curiosity. Lastly, curiosity towards our meditation practice and the philosophies that inform it allow for a less rigid and dogmatic approach.
When we're bringing in theory from the traditional Buddhist path or if we practice another wisdom lineage, we're bringing in theory to inform the purpose or meaning behind the meditation we're practicing. Curiosity allows us to discover meaning through putting something into practice, through reflecting on it, basically through not just turning something into another rigid or dogmatic belief.
Part of the problem within our general human predicament is that it’s easy to fall prey to dogmatism with our ideas, opinions, and beliefs. So if we replace those rigid, dogmatic beliefs about ourselves and the world, etc., with religious or spiritual beliefs, we just change what the tape is playing. The sound playing is different, but the approach is the same. It’s stagnant.
One reason these spiritual paths exist is to start to break that up. But of course, we all fall prey to our habit patterns. So, at the end of the day, if we're not applying curiosity to our study and learning of a certain wisdom tradition, Buddhist tradition, etc., it has the risk of becoming dogmatic.
So, for me, it's very important to apply curiosity when we're learning the Dharma, when we're studying the Dharma. So, when we apply this kind of curiosity and openness when we're reflecting, learning, studying a spiritual path or wisdom tradition, eventually we're going to develop Conviction. And this is the second C.
There are various types of conviction in the Buddhist path. We have conviction born from understanding, basically a conceptual or intellectual type of conviction. Then we have conviction that comes from practice, where we bring our understanding into our meditation and start to churn out our own personal experience and transformation. Of course, that conviction is a lot stronger than intellectual conviction.
As that conviction grows further in our personal practice, we could say our direct experience, we eventually grow what's called in some of the Mahayana Traditions, Yogic Direct Perception, where we start to transcend some of our relationships to suffering, pain, self, etc. And I would say that is really the kind of conviction we want to reach. But it's also important to have some intellectual conviction. We don't want to just stay with intellectual conviction, but it's important to have that.
So, for me, curiosity isn't enough. We need to develop conviction eventually in the Dharma and in our practice of the Dharma. So, conviction is not blind belief. Even when we're gaining conviction as an understanding by studying, for instance, the Buddhist path or a Dharma path, it's not that we need to do that through blind belief.
In the Tibetan Buddhist Traditions, we mainly first develop conviction based on reasoning. So, we would be learning certain texts, philosophies, perspectives, and we're using curiosity, that first C, to investigate. We weigh it against our own perception, our own experience, what we've learned previously, and we start to develop new ways of seeing the world.
This is still conceptual, but it's really useful, and it doesn't have to be blind because it's based on reasoning. It's based on inference through logic. So that has a lot of value, and I think also prevents the trap of dogma based on blind belief.
Conviction takes time. I remember the first five years that I was studying in the Tibetan Buddhist lineages, and it was really confusing. There were some concepts I could kind of understand and find some conviction in, and there were certain subjects like the subject of Shunyata that I just had no clue about. But I liked it. And so, through steady effort, through consistent study, through consistent practice, things grow, things change, and our understanding and conviction can develop.
Though no matter how much conviction we gain in the deeper purposes of meditation and the Dharma, if we don't apply Commitment, which is the third C, we're not going to be able to develop that personal direct experience that is really the purpose of the path at the end of the day.
Commitment can mean a few things here. Obviously, there's commitment to showing up to our meditation cushion or practice regularly. For a lot of practicing Buddhists, at least in the lineages I practice, there's commitment to study every day. There's commitment to reading, trying to understand the Dharma, learning new things. There's also commitment to reflecting on what we're learning. And then, as I said, there's commitment to putting it into practice as best we can or learning how to practice something because we might not know right away. So, I would really say that's the ground of commitment.
But commitment also means the intention that we're cultivating, why we're engaging in meditation or Dharma practice. This is sometimes where I see a point of stagnation for people because sometimes we're still working with our understanding of the Dharma, and we haven't developed that deeper commitment or purpose within it.
In my opinion, this needs to be one of the key elements or key approaches to our practice, which is developing our intention based in the Dharma and growing that intention more and more and forming it and maturing it. So, there's commitment to regular practice, regular study, regular reflection, but there's also commitment to why we're doing this in the first place. There's commitment to growing that intention, to widening it.
So, commitment towards our genuine transformation is key. Eventually, we encounter key practices in the Mahayana Buddhist tradition like Bodhichitta, which is a Sanskrit word that means the mind of Awakening. When we go further with the meaning, it means to develop an intention or aspiration to awaken for the benefit of all beings. That would be its basic premise.
So, we can start to see here that commitment is not just what we do, but it's why we're doing it. It's the purpose behind what we do. So, we have the commitment to a daily practice of personal transformation, etc., but why are we doing that, and what does it actually mean to transform?
In traditional Buddhism, they give us tools to be curious about. They give us tools to first gain conviction in and then commit to. And that commitment to Bodhichitta is a big one. It's one that we mature over time. It's not something immediate, but we first learn about it, and we cultivate it as an intention. And then we start to make it more direct. We start to make it more experiential.
But I just wanted to point out the importance to not just our commitment to meditation, but to the why, or purpose behind it. And really, we can see just like anything in our life, commitment is vital. If we don't actually commit to anything, we don’t progress. And the truth is, from there, we stagnate. We don't move along because we're not iterating on our intention, our commitment to practice, why we're practicing, what we're practicing. So, really, this third C is so vital. If it doesn't happen, where do we expect our practice to go?
So, this brings us to the fourth C, which is Container. Commitment and Container can kind of be interchangeable here. Like I said, these aren't linear, necessarily. But I would say that the last two are especially not linear because sometimes the container comes first, and then we commit to that container. And sometimes we commit to a simple practice, a breath practice, or a practice of taking Refuge or generating Bodhichitta before our meditation practice, and then the container grows.
Container is the “what.” It's what we are practicing, what we are doing, but it's also the container that holds us. So what we're committing to and why also inform the container. I don't think it's helpful to reduce meditation to techniques. Now, are there meditation techniques? Of course, there are. How else can we relate to them? There are methods, techniques, however we want to call it. But when it comes to reducing them to a technique, it misses the container.
Because the practice, when it's just a technique, it's not contained in a wider field of why we're doing something, of how it interacts or how it's in relationship to other practices, or how it's in relationship to the path as a whole. So, I would say when it's just a technique, there is no path. It's just a technique, and we don't really have a container.
Just something to think about, just a side note. Another way to think of this is without a container, there's no way to fulfill our commitment because we have no cup to work with. We don't have anything that we're following through with what we've committed to.
Similar to what I said earlier, it's not like the first time I encountered the Dharma, I had a container. I was curious. I had a little bit of conviction, but I didn't have a container. I didn't have a commitment. This took time to develop. So, it's okay if we don't have these four right away. But the idea is that we're working towards them. We're working towards developing them. And I think the container is a big one.
Overall I hope this gives you some things to think about and work with in your practice. Remember, the Four C's: Curiosity, Conviction, Commitment, and Container. Keep them in mind as you continue your practice.
