This session is part of Reflective Meditation’s Daily Online Meditation practice at reflectivemeditation.org/dailyonline.
This is the second talk in a series on the whys of Reflective Meditation: why we structure our time together the way we do, and why we make some choices and not others. Linda looks at a question that can sound contradictory at first. Why do we give permission to do any practice, and yet encourage meditators to allow more into their practice?
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Why we ask why
One of the things we want to do in Reflective Meditation is be more transparent about why we do what we do. Reflecting on our practice is part of the practice. So why do we structure our time together in a particular way? Why do we make some choices but not others? And what are we hoping will happen in a practice? We’ve come up with a few why questions to speak to, and we’d like you to consider your own as well.
Today’s question: why do we give permission to do any practice, and yet encourage meditators to allow more into their practice?
As I thought about it, I wondered whether it sounds like a sincere invitation. It is, and yet it can be contradictory at times. And besides, aren’t we supposed to teach people how to meditate, to tell you what to do? Maybe it depends on what we call meditation. Is it a task to do correctly? A process to understand ourselves? A way of being quiet and calming our minds? A mind training? A place to hold and transform dukkha?
People arrive at Reflective Meditation with this word meditation, and often it has a lot of assumptions, a lot of certainty, and a lot of uncertainty packed into it.
The invitation is choice
When I thought about it further, I realized the sincere invitation we’re giving is choice. And choice in a practice is another way of being trauma-informed. If there’s only one way to practice, it can set up a dynamic of success and failure, true and false, right and wrong. Our intention with choice is to put you on a different trajectory.
We can’t eliminate those mentalities. That’s the soup we’re all living in, and we’ve been trained really well to learn what’s right and wrong. But it doesn’t have to be the main flavor of meditation. Reflective Meditation is more about finding your way to meditate, finding your way to meditation.
Yesterday, one of our members described their experience of Reflective Meditation as having some healthy boundaries with lots of space. Early on, someone in one of our groups said it was like walking their dog with a really long leash. Another person said it felt like having a container inside to hold all the contents of her life, so she could sort through things in a safe place, which was really important to her.
And yet another person said, “You have given me so much choice, I don’t know what the heck to do. Where do I start?” She’s right. Too much choice can be too much choice. Just think about going to the grocery store these days, or buying a pair of shoes.
A container, not a leap
So our intention is not to leave you out on a limb with choice and say, “figure it out.” We’re providing a container for you to follow what you’re interested in, and to see what happens.
What do you want to do when you hold your body still? What happens when you let your thoughts be part of the practice rather than something you have to get rid of? What happens when your breathing relaxes and you start to drift off, maybe? Maybe even, what do you like to do?
There’s enough structure in our practice that you can explore, and the flexibility means your own experience can begin to tell you something about how you want to practice.
What do you like?
I want to go back to that question: in your practice, what are you attracted to? This was a really weird permission for me at the beginning, because when I first started meditating I was attracted to all sorts of things that weren’t good for me. It was confusing.
Attraction is quite complex, and mysterious. It often hides some of our very basic human needs. Sometimes what attracts us is really helpful. Sometimes it may be a way of trying to get something we need. And sometimes it can take us in directions that aren’t particularly helpful. But how do we know it’s off the table from the get-go?
Needs
The word need is important to us in Reflective Meditation. In our book, we added it to the fourth mark of existence. Traditional teachings teach impermanence, unsatisfactoriness or dukkha, and no enduring self. We added needs to this list because it was something we kept encountering in our own experience.
Sometimes with meditation it’s a simple question: what do I need today? That answer can change. Maybe I need some quiet today. Maybe I need to move my body, or I need the support of a guided meditation. Online, this makes it easier to figure out what we need today, because we can turn off our camera and meditate the way we want. We can’t always meditate the way we want, but in the daily practice there’s room for it. Sometimes there’s even an “I don’t need to meditate today, I need to focus on something else.” We want there to be room for that kind of knowing.
We can also come back to the other side of the question, what do I need, because we don’t want it to narrow your experience. Many times we don’t know what we need, or we think we know what we need and something else shows up. We think we need to calm down, but then we see that looking at what’s making us really angry is more important. We may think we need to get rid of a conversation that keeps replaying, or a story we’re telling about ourselves, but instead we can become curious about why it keeps running. Sometimes we think we need to be quiet and meditate, and we discover what we need is more connection with nature. We need to open our eyes, move around outside a little, and get to know the trees blowing in the wind.
Permission and allowing
So we want to give you a structure to explore, something to push against and something to come back to. But we don’t want that structure to be so firm that it becomes a box telling you how you should be when you meditate. We’re not trying to have everybody have the same experience, or reach the same understandings. We’re trying to help you become more intimate with your own experience.
Starting with choice rather than control or certainty, we invite a willingness to allow in what you might not have chosen also. So I think there’s a relationship between permission and allowing more. Permission gives you the room to find your own way, and allowing more keeps that way from becoming too narrow.
We say you have permission because your experience is your own, and we don’t want to prescribe it to you. And we say allow more because you may not yet know what your experience has to show you.
I’ll end my prompt here for this morning.
