A Few Insights from My 12-Year Meditation Journey
And How to Find the Right Meditation Technique for You
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A Few Insights from My 12-Year Meditation Journey
When I started meditating 12 years ago, my first exposure was sitting at some Zen centers in Texas. It was boring and hard to understand at the time. My real practice kicked off in 2013 through daily audio meditation on the Headspace app, and I felt some shifts in my perspective in just a few weeks. It got me hooked.
Today the number of meditation apps, guided YouTube meditations and teachers out there are growing exponentially. It can feel a little overwhelming. On one hand it almost doesn’t matter where you start, as long as you start. Like I did back then, you don’t need to know about the traditions or history or philosophy — just practicing is enough.
That said it can be nice to have an overview of some of the main techniques and where they’re coming from. The reason being some approaches appeal to different people; if your only exposure is one type, and you don’t like it and give up, then that’s a real shame. So, I thought I’d share a little snapshot of what I’ve learned about these traditions in my journey.
But First, What is Meditation?
I like to keep it really broad: Meditation is anything that opens your heart and mind. By that definition, running 10 miles or looking at a sunset could be meditation. And they very well could be.
A more specific definition might include the right circumstances and setting to find inner solitude, peace of mind, and to gain insight into yourself/reality. Jack Kornfield says,
“Meditation is a deliberate training of attention that awakens us beyond the conditioned mind and habitual thinking, and reveals the nature of reality.”
Prayer, visualization, and focusing on a candle flame can all be types of meditation. There is no “wrong” or “right” way to meditate. It’s whatever works for you!
Starting with a juicy intention
We all need a juicy reason or intention to start meditation. In my case, I was really stressed with work, and (not really consciously at the time) grieving the loss of a friend. For many of us, we just want a little bit of peace, calm and space in our minds. Perhaps to be more present in our relationships or engaged at work.
There is a ton of science on the benefits of meditation. In fact, over 4,000 studies and counting on how meditation can have a positive impact in some way. Some of these not replicable, but many of them hold water.
One thing people are often surprised by is that it is not just about mental suffering, but meditation also reduces physical suffering, too. In one study, Professor Kabat-Zinn reported that the skin lesions of psoriasis patients who listened to meditation tapes cleared up four times faster than those who did not.
Here is one overview of the reduction of symptoms in various diseases after regular practice of meditation:
People with heart disease: 45% reduction
High blood pressure: 43% reduction
Pain: 25% reduction
Stress: 31% reduction
The reason you start meditating doesn’t matter so much — reduction in pain, or less stress at work — as long as it can keep you motivated to keep meditating for a few weeks, until it becomes a habit. The studies say about 15 minutes a day for 8 weeks before it becomes a habit. So don’t give up!
Meditating to “Wake Up?”
The reasons to start meditating can be more spiritual (or, it can become more spiritual later). And by spiritual I mean anything that is a search for meaning, which, let’s be honest, most of us are looking for. My “big spiritual experience” was getting burnout and realizing that all the common trappings of what is considered success (startup, money, working remotely) were making me miserable.
Interestingly, spiritual experiences are a lot more common than you might think — and can catapult us into focusing more on spiritual practices like meditation. A Gallup survey from 2002 of 1,509 Americans found the following:
A staggering 41%—projecting to 80 million American adults—fully identified with the statement “I have had a profound religious experience or awakening that changed the direction of my life.”
Spiritual leaders like Eckhart Tolle claim to have had “sudden awakenings” when, in Tolle’s case, he was sitting on a park bench one day and then suddenly lost all sense of subject-object divide. The ego evaporated, leaving only a timeless sense of being part of the universe.
Neuroscience has been able to replicate some of these awakening states — from seeing angels and experiencing god to being one with the universe — in the laboratory. In the 1980’s Michael Persinger used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to induce certain mystical experiences, which later became known as the “God Helmet.”
More recent studies on expert meditators like Daniel Ingram and Delson Armstrong show different brain structures and states compared to the average person. For these individuals, the brain’s default mode network, a series of brain regions responsible for rumination/worrying, is turned off. Whoah. I wrote an article that goes into more detail about how meditation can change your baseline happiness levels.
The deep-end of meditation
When you go further down the meditative path, your mind will become more peaceful, heart more open, and it becomes easier to trust your intuition. At the very end of the spectrum there are many accounts of what it feels like to reach “full awakening.” Daniel Ingram in his book Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha describes final liberation this way:
“Utter centerlessness: no watcher, no sense of a watcher, no subtle watcher, no possibility of a watcher… Utter agencylessness: meaning no agency, no sense of doing, no sense of doer, no sense that there could be any agent or doer, no way to find anything that seems to be in control at all.”
This sounds pretty cool, or maybe it sounds weird or scary, and you’d rather not experience any of that. That’s okay. Many of us probably won’t get to that level anyway unless we are pretty dedicated.
But, even if we get to just 10% of that through our meditative/spiritual practices — letting go of our ego and not being so self-centered — this would be a drastic shift from what our daily waking life currently is. And, in my opinion, that is probably worth it. :)
Okay, so where does meditation come from?
Most meditation practices people are familiar with come out of either Buddhist or Hindu traditions. This includes mindfulness meditation, Vipassana, visualization practices, using mantras like Omm, and non-dual practices like Advaita or Dzogchen.
In the West, meditation really took hold in the 60s and 70s. You had Maharishi Mahesh Yogi who was famously the guru of the Beatles and Beach Boys. He practiced a form of Hindu non-dual meditation repackaged as transcendental meditation.
Famous teachers who spent time in Asia and brought teachings back to the West include Alan Watts, Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Sharon Salzburg, Ram Dass, Pema Chodron, among others, who all had a profound impact on meditation and helped popularize meditation into what it is today. A great place to start is to pick up a few books by the above teachers.
I would say 90% of practices I see either out there and on Meditation apps like Insight Timer and Headspace come out of the Theravada Vipassana tradition (this includes breath, noting, labelling, compassion, loving kindness, body scans), Zen and Tibetan Buddhism (various forms of breath and visualization practice), and non-dual practices like Advaita Vedanta and TM that stem from Hinduism (popular on the Waking Up app by Sam Harris).
It’s important to note that there are mystic traditions that are found all over the world which have some form of Meditation, this includes Native American Shamanism, Daosim, Stoicism, Christian Gnosticism and Sufism, Plant medicine traditions (ayuahsqueros), to name a few of the big ones. Some of these are less well known (or don’t have loud spokespeople) but no less rich in tradition and wisdom.
Buddhism is a big one
One way to break down the different types of meditation is to look at all the different traditions all around the world, and use that as a starting point. This could take you a very long time but just as an example, you can check out this mind map of Buddhist lineages. Each lineage has some variation of a meditation technique. It’s probably not up to date or perfect, but gives you some idea of the threads!
Given the above, one way to find a practice for yourself to dive into each of those traditions and look at their Wikipedia pages and practices, find a local meetup or online guided meditation, and then go from there. See what draws you in. I’m not aware of a book or resource that maps them all out succinctly (but let me know if you come across something)! A relatively comprehensive Wikipedia list of meditation techniques here.
Is the History Important?
By the way, you don’t need to memorize all of the different types of Buddhism…just know that it is there. But I want to point out this historical backdrop is not always made explicit. That’s fine, usually. In some cases when you separate just the “meditation” part from the other parts (like living a moral life, or gaining insight), then the practices don’t have quite the same punch.
For instance, if you look at the widely practiced Hatha yoga, the original purpose outlined in the Hatha Yoga Pradipika was to move towards enlightenment through a series of breathing techniques (pranayama) and movement (asanas), not to have a more flexible body or a sweaty morning workout.
Ditto for Buddhism. A study found people who meditate and follow the 5 Precepts found their meditation to be more effective. This is part of following the Noble Eightfold path, something I knew nothing about even after years of using a meditation app, but that has become more important to me today. (Practically speaking, don’t drink alcohol for a few months and you will notice your meditation and happiness skyrocket).
It’s also a little confusing — you might experience the temporary “loss” of your self during meditation (or all sorts of non-ordinary states of consciousness), which is cool, or kind of scary if you’re not expecting it. There are plenty of “side effects” to meditation you don’t hear about often (see my article here). Could be good to know about some of this before diving head first.
There is also new information that we are getting, so we shouldn’t be too strict about how we approach things, in my opinion. For example, one study found that magic mushrooms and meditation were more meaningful than just doing one alone. I agree. So, as we learn more and experiment, there is plenty of room to update our old traditions and create our own synthesis and unique approach.
In sum, maybe knowing a little bit about where these practices come from can be helpful to set expectations and contextualize how these have been practiced for thousands of years, although we certainly don’t have to be experts in them.
The different levels of meditation
Interestingly, many traditions have “levels” and “maps” of meditation they describe. All of them share striking similarity (usually 7-9 stages, from separation to unification). This may not seem super relevant if you’re just getting into the basics of meditation, but I believe it can be really useful to know what you were getting yourself into from the start.
The point isn’t so much to focus on these Maps or think about them often (at the risk of focusing on a “goal” too much, as many Zen teachers warn), but just to understand them and that these are paths many before you have walked (although you will walk it in your own unique way!). Personally, I think it’s quite useful, and has allowed me to articulate my own experiences and better understand the experience of others.
For example, St. Teresa of Avila was a Spanish (Catholic) mystic who lived in the 1600’s talked about The 9 Ladders of Prayer. In the first couple of steps, you start to turn inwards and detach from worldly concerns. Then, through prayer which is verbalized, you start to connect with god. Then, you drop the words and connect with the feeling. Then as you move up the ladders you experience a lot of joy and then unification with god.
Buddhism has many traditions and they all talk about stages leading to awakening. Zen talks about satori and the 10 Stages of Enlightenment (using the metaphor of ox herding). Tibetan Buddhism talks about rigpa and accessing a state of unconditioned awareness. The Theravada tradition (which I practice) talks about nirvana and the path to get there through levels of deepening insight, or jhanas, of which there are said to be 8 until reaching the first stage of awakening called stream entry (of which there are 4 stages).
My own practice took a very important shift once I learned about these stages and started intentionally cultivating jhanic states in a practice called TWIM, which as one person describes is “100 times better than chocolate cake.” I incorporate other practices, too, but having clear levels of progress was a big motivator for me to spend more time meditating (which, in turn, had pretty positive benefits in my life!)
While many of these traditions have different starting points, from using prayer, the breath, loving kindness, or reciting some mantra, they all ultimately move towards non-dual states and end up in some transcendental experience and letting go of the ego. The cool states you experience along the way are just markers (or distractions, depending on how you look at it), but they are not the goal.
Where to start?
If you look at the Pali cannon, which is the oldest known text in Buddhism followed by the Theravada tradition, the Buddha assigned over 80 different objects of meditation, depending on the personality and circumstances of the person. (If you’re young and “lustful” he would adding corpse meditation, if you were angry and mean, then loving kindness, and for many people just starting with the breath etc.)
It might be tempting to have a toolkit of dozens of meditations to try so that it can be practical and tailored towards you. This is probably not necessary, at least from my experience. A couple of techniques is probably all you need, according to one of my mentors. In practice, it looks something like this:
You spend time meditating every day (20 minutes, at least)
During meditation, stuff comes up, and you let it go using whatever technique that you learned
In day to day life, when you have conflict, feel sad, angry, unworthy, you take a deep breath, and then apply the same technique in the moment and let it go
For “bigger” stuff, you intentionally bring it up in meditation and let it go. This could takes hours, weeks or months, depending on how big the thing is/how reactive you are
Rinse and repeat. Consider spending longer stretches in silence (hours or days) to accelerate the purification process
Breadth vs depth of practice
You can spend years trying dozens of techniques and not get really deep into any one of them. The general advice echoed by one of my favorite Vipasana teaches, S.N. Goenka, is when you are looking for water in the desert, it’s better to dig one deep hole instead of many shallow ones. In other words, it’s okay to sample a few and find one that draws you in, but then stick with that for at least 3 to 5 years and see where it takes you. The way you’re really giving it a fair shot, and of course you can still experiment with other stuff on the side, but keep your main practice.
If you are starting with an app, you can still get pretty deep. However, once you start going on retreats if that’s something you’re interested in, you will probably naturally get more curious about where this practice is coming from and will take you down a rabbit hole where you are learning more specifics about that tradition.
Personally, I’ve had the most experience with mindfulness of breath, Vipassana body scans, and loving kindness meditation. These have all been extremely powerful in their own ways. The deeper I get into one meditation, as long as I’m not dogmatic about it, the more it opens up and flowers into openness to other practices. The deeper I understand one practice, and then try another one, the clearer it is how connected they all are; and it’s also a lot easier to pick up other practices once you have a strong base in one.
Three great books to start with
These are “gateway drugs” to meditation and spirituality, as one friend described, and can open up a lot of ideas for what direction to proceed in.
Path with Heart by Jack Kornfield. He trained in mostly the Thai forest tradition but draws on a lot of traditions. There is so much timeless wisdom in this book and I find myself going back to it often.
Waking Up by Sam Harris. It’s skewed towards non-dual practice, but he does provide some good overall background on different techniques. His app Waking Up has a variety of conversations across traditions too!
Letting Go by David Hawkins. A more secular view of all of our emotional states and how to practically let them go in daily situations, leaving room to open ourselves to “higher” states of consciousness like love, joy and acceptance.
Anyways, those are just a few thoughts for now. There is a lot to say here and I have glossed over a lot, but I hope there are some interesting nuggets for you to chew on and rabbits to follow. Let me know if you have any comments below :)
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Very helpful for me. Thanks!