Wake Up Call #374: Is Meditation Required?
Hi everyone, it’s Judi Cohen and this is Wake Up Call 374. It’s been a while! I’m so glad to be back and to see you.
Let’s head back into exploring the paramitas. We’ve looked at the perfection of generosity, ethical conduct, patience, and joyful effort. Norman Fischer, in his wonderful book called The World Could be Otherwise, calls these first four of the six Zen paramitas, the “ordinary” ways that humans of all cultures develop character: by learning to be generous, ethical, patient, and full of joyful effort towards an upright life.
The last two paramitas are dhyana paramita, or the perfection of meditation, and prajna paramita, the perfection of understanding or wisdom. These, Norman says, invite us into an exploration of a more mystical or spiritual perspective.
I’d also say that in my experience, meditation and wisdom are abundantly practical. I hadn’t ever even heard the word “meditation,” before I took my first mindfulness course in 1993. And when I sat down for my first meditation ever, I thought it was impossible. My mind was completely gone – which it still is during many sits – but for the first time, I realized that being gone was a thing, and that not being gone was a possibility – and could be really useful.
About a year before, I’d been playing with my then 14-month-old daughter. She was exploring her world: picking up one toy at a time, looking at it closely, feeling its texture, tasting it of course, then putting it down and picking up something else.
Just one toy at a time, and just one sense at a time. Sight. Sensation. Taste. Maybe smell. And it occurred to me: I never did that.
I didn’t pick up one toy. And I also didn’t pick up one kitchen implement, or one document. Or if I did, I didn’t do just one thing with it. I multi-tasked! Which I was super proud of. The more things I could do at once, I believed, the more I could get done. Yet here was this tiny being soaking in the world, one thing at a time.
Fast-forward to that first mindfulness workshop and I realized how little I knew about one-thing-at-a-time. As if I were trying to swim and had never been in the water.
Once, at a law & social change jam, at a gorgeous farm in the Catskills, there was a beautiful, deep, natural pond. It was summertime and a teammate and I were up early, so we decided to head to the pond. When we arrived, I dove in and started swimming out into the middle but my teammate was stayed in the shallows. I beckoned them enthusiastically, but they didn’t budge. I swam back, we both waded out, and we sat on the shore. My teammate looked so heartbreakingly sad. All their life, they said, they had wanted to swim, but they had never learned how. We held one another in that early dawn, while they cried.
The grief was familiar to me because that was what eventually surfaced, after a few weeks of “practicing” meditation, after that first workshop. I realized I knew how to hold a baby and cook dinner at the same time; how to keep five or seven or twelve matters in mind all at once; how to go for a run, listen to music, and tease out a case. But I had no idea how to do just one thing.
So I learned. It took time – not more time than learning to practice law, or than learning to be a decent cook, or a good enough mom – but time. I’m still learning. And my teammate – they learned how to swim!
So when people ask me if they can learn to meditate by paying attention while doing something else, my answer, from my own experience anyway, is, not really. Portable practice is great, don’t get me wrong. Do that as much as you can: check in as you walk into a room, meditate on your walk to the park. Pay attention while you’re driving. Take twenty seconds to breathe when that awful email arrives. I do all of these things and they’re very supportive.
But also, take a few minutes every day to do just one thing: meditate.
Here’s how Norman puts it:
Meditation is a specific technical skill. It requires instruction, discipline, and development…. [M]editation is the basic background practice that makes all other practices possible and effective…. [And while the word “meditation” – with its roots in Old French and Latin – means, from a Western perspective] “to think over, to think deeply, to reflect [mindfulness meditation is different. It comes to us from India, from Buddhism, and is what Norman calls “the psychophysical practice of concentration”: sitting upright, unmoving, silent, steady, and aware; focused on the breath, noticing when the mind wanders off and kindly, gently, re-placing it on the breath. Not “also” walking to the park, riding a bike, cooking; not also thinking.
But also, back to Norman’s point that the perfection of meditation and understanding are mystical, spiritual: when we practice mindfulness meditation, over time the mind really does become quieter during meditation, and that spills over into everyday life. Contemplative neuroscientists say we’re re-wiring neurons, carving new neural pathways, but there’s something mystical about it, too. There’s also less anxiety and we’re less prone to depression – something else that’s been studied, too, but is also a kind of awakening to the beauty and peace available in each moment. There is less physical, mental, and emotional reactivity, the body becomes calmer, the heart rate slows, and the heart opens, and those of us who’ve noticed these things – probably everyone here – know this goes deeper than the research has, at least as of yet. And we learn to be kind to ourselves, which has been nothing short of miraculous for me, and which spills over into our lives and is what, I think, the poet Mary Oliver meant when she said, in The Summer Day, I don't know exactly what a prayer is.I do know how to pay attention, how to fall downinto the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,which is what I have been doing all day.Tell me, what else should I have done?Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?Tell me, what is it you plan to dowith your one wild and precious life?
So, don’t multi-task your meditation. Make meditation something ordinary and regular that you just do, like brushing your teeth, or showering, and also something sacred and beautiful that you’re grateful you heard about it and decided to try it and are able-bodied and clear-minded enough to do right now.
And yes, to today’s question: meditation is pretty much required. And how fortunate that we can do it.
Let’s sit.
Do we really have to sit
for six or twelve or twenty or thirty minutes a day,
in silence, paying attention to our breath?
Can’t we just pay attention while we’re doing something else, too -
something a little more fun?
Why can’t we be multi-tasking meditators?
[Play the John Lennon Imagine video at the end of the Paramitas – whenever that is! (It’s bookmarked under Music.)]
