The Question of Progress

“I've been meditating for some time now, but my mind seems just as chaotic and confused as when I started. Am I doing something wrong?”

Nearly everyone who practices meditation has similar concerns, no matter how long they've been at it; three weeks, three years, or three decades. When students confront me with the question of progress, I simply try to redirect their attention. I've found that the best thing is for them to keep practicing.

We call it meditation “practice” for a reason. Any form of practice consists of doing something repeatedly and failing again and again. Through this process, we gradually build the capacities that make it possible to do what we're practicing. There's nothing special about meditation: like anything else, it's a collection of skills.

Much of the confusion about meditation results from the fact that the different processes involved tend to be grouped without clear distinction. It's like learning to play the flute without distinguishing between blowing a long, sustained tone and a full round one, or between the skills of playing and fingering.

When it comes to meditation, some people can sit still without tension in their bodies; others are able to track the coming and going of the breath; still others are able to open themselves to everything they experience; and yet others excel at clear, precise focus, at visualizations, and so on. There are many ways to practice meditation, but all of them involve several separate skills.

Just as with athletic or artistic efforts, if we take meditation seriously, we spend considerable time training in these basic skills. We don't train all the necessary skills at once; we train one and then another. It's repetitive and not particularly exciting. But as we gain competence and proficiency in each one, we become able to combine them in increasingly complex ways. Then things start to get interesting.

But even so, we can't expect success in every attempt. We are training, and because we know we are training, we need to be willing to learn from our failures. Each failure reveals what we lack in precision, strength, flexibility, resilience, endurance, or dexterity.

We learn where our weaknesses are and how to compensate for them or remedy them. And we also come to appreciate where our strengths lie and how to build on them.

If we're learning to play a piece of music, we practice and practice and gradually gather what's needed. We become able to sustain notes with good tone so we can play the slower passages. Our fingers develop the flexibility and dexterity to handle the faster and more complex parts.

I can play lyrical pieces beautifully, but I may never be good at the kind of pyrotechnics necessary for solo performances. And you might be able to bring passion and power to Beethoven but lose the nuance in Satie's subtle duets with silence. And that's just how it is.

Apps, neural feedback devices, and other instruments for tracking various bodily and neurological states that have entered the spiritual marketplace can be useful for developing and refining certain skills. But it makes about as much sense to reduce the progress of meditation to measures as it does to reduce music to how long we can sustain a note or how quickly we can play a certain scale.

When it comes to meditation, we have to look at the different skills involved and figure out how to train in each one.

Take mindfulness, for example. It has recently attracted a lot of attention, but in terms of meditation skills, it's just one of many. If we think of the mind as a musical instrument, mindfulness involves simply learning to play in tune. That's very important; if we can't play in tune, nothing we play sounds good and other people probably won't want to make music with us. But even after mastering tuning, we still have to learn to play actual melodies to make real music. Mindfulness might be great for baroque, but when we discover the blues, we find a whole new set of skills to learn. The same goes for meditation.

Then comes the question of commitment. Again, the similarities to music are striking. If we practice half an hour a day on a musical instrument, we'll slowly learn to play it. If we practice an hour or several hours a day, our skills will develop more quickly. On the other hand, if we practice too much, we might burn ourselves out and not learn anything. So, as with many other aspects of life, balance matters.

But in any case, why practice?

Although there are well-documented benefits to meditation, approaching meditation for its particular benefits is very much like exercising to stay fit. It becomes a task, another thing to do. This is not the best approach. Often it results in a not-so-subtle form of resentment that undermines the equanimity and ease necessary for effective practice.

Although meditation is now more often presented as something “good for us,” it is closer to a form of art. Difficult and challenging, it requires a complex set of skills. And it takes time and effort to learn, let alone to master.

Again, the parallels with music are interesting: sometimes we might resent the many hours we had to put into practice, but the pleasure we experience in making music gives us joy and brings pleasure to others throughout our lives.

If we take meditation as we would any other artistic activity, we're unlikely to have regrets. Quite the opposite; the meaning of the practice will grow and unfold throughout our lives.

Originally published in Tricycle