How to Explore Meditation: A Primer

The path of Buddhism is often called The Middle Way, as it’s midway between indulging in sense desires and renouncing them. The Buddha essentially said you can eat and feel good, but if you want to be liberated from suffering you can’t be attached to eating and feeling good.

“If you let go a little, you will find a little peace. If you let go a lot, you will find a lot of peace. If you let go absolutely, you will find absolute peace and tranquility.”

Thank God, because while I could never focus long enough to get access concentration, I found my ADHD mind could actually get into Vipassana practices, and I went on to customize a practice for myself that really helped with my ADHD.

When we are trying to meditate and catch ourselves caught up in a thought, this is not a failure, but actually a win. Catching ourselves caught up in thought is one of the most important skills to develop. We can’t let thoughts go if we don’t first catch ourselves in them. So we want to create a positive association with catching ourselves in thought. Whenever you catch yourself thinking, this is a mindful moment. Give yourself a little pat on the back.

Vipassana roughly translates to “super seeing” and is also commonly called Insight Meditation or Mindfulness Meditation. It’s focused on investigating and deconstructing experience to reveal its true nature, the true nature of self and world (which are claimed to in fact be the same thing).

The Three Characteristics The Buddha claimed that, for whatever reason, there are certain aspects of reality that we don’t perceive accurately. This misperception keeps us stuck in deluded suffering. In Vipassana meditation, we observe our experience intently, and the true nature of reality reveals itself more and more.

The more we examine and watch reality, the more we see (and internalize) that things come and go (and nothing lasts), that fulfilling our desires is inherently unsatisfying (and resisting/avoiding pain and discomfort just make it harder), and that there isn’t a fixed, separate self to be found anywhere (the Self is a relational construct, and doesn’t exist an any independent way).

If we can get through the conceptual projection onto our feelings, let go of judgments and resistance and just experience the sensations for what they are (equanimity), we will find that feelings are a lot more manageable.

Normally we think of only living things being aware, and awareness existing somewhere behind the eyes, but Buddhism teaches that everything, without exception, is not separate from the awareness that perceives these things.

“Although it can be useful to think of mindfulness as ‘being with things as they really are’, it is in fact more accurate, and more helpful for our purposes, to understand basic mindfulness practice as a way of looking that merely fabricates a little less than our habitual ways of looking.” -Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees

The key to this whole process is to embrace the stage you’re at. If you’re mostly seeing the world conceptually, really notice what that’s like. As you pay attention to the conceptual projection onto people and objects, you’ll naturally start to see things more apart from the projection, or with a little less fabrication.