How to Tell If a Meditation Practice Is Working

I'd like to pass along some advice that has come down through generations of contemplatives, and it is this: when you're engaged in any kind of meditation practice, there's a natural tendency to evaluate how well it's going, whether it's a good practice or a bad one, based on how you feel while meditating. Do you feel better? Calmer? Happier? Blissful? It's very easy to do that. But it's a superficial way to evaluate the practice. It would be like being sedentary and out of shape, with little endurance or strength, and then going to a gym and judging your exercises based on how you feel while working out. If you're going to a gym with a trainer and doing it regularly, wait a month to evaluate whether this selection of exercises or this routine is good for you. Not on the first day, not after the first week; that's too soon. But after a month of going regularly, maybe three times a week, if you're not seeing any improvement, if you're not getting the change you want, then you should probably look for a different gym, trainer, or set of exercises.

If you're looking for nothing more than a pleasant experience with meditation, well, that's easy enough to find; you can have pleasant experiences from all sorts of things that require far less effort. But if you want to bring about a meaningful and lasting change, the real criterion for evaluating "this type of meditation versus that one" is: how does the practice influence you when you're not on the cushion? What's the quality of your practice while you're sitting, but more importantly, all that time when you're not on the cushion. And as weeks pass, you discover significant improvement and transformation across all three areas: greater balance of attention, deeper insight and understanding, greater openness of heart, and so on. A month is a reasonable amount of time.

It's easy, once again, to evaluate meditation based on how good you feel while sitting, but that's not a very useful assessment. (...) When you sit down to meditate, check what the quality of your mind is, what degree of mental balance you have before you start. And then, the most important thing is: when you finish the session, don't apply some abstract standard or gold standard independent of your own baseline, saying "this practice was good, that one wasn't good," because that's not useful. Instead, consider the degree of mental balance you started with and whether there was any improvement by the end. Were you more balanced? Or at least a bit more relaxed? Or was your heart a little more open? And so on.

But don't wait until everything is fine before you start meditating. It's easy to say: "I'm too agitated," "I'm too stressed," "I'm too tired," "I'm too busy," "I'm too whatever, so I won't meditate." And then you meditate and discover it was really difficult. "My mind was restless the whole time." Maybe it was, but that's like saying: "I'm too sick. I won't take the medicine." But that's exactly when you need the medicine most, right? So approach it with gentleness, with insight, with a big-picture perspective, and don't just hold a preconceived idea that "this is a good meditation; this is a bad meditation," buying into something I've seen in the press about something called a "meditative state."

Transcribed from a retreat led by Alan Wallace in Australia in 2015.