Meditation is the path
"The highest teaching is the one that reveals our hidden faults."
The practice of mindfulness (in all its forms) brings us from conceptual understanding, through sustained contemplation, and into direct realization. Like any vehicle, it can get sidetracked and slowed down. In A Beginner's Guide to Tibetan Buddhism, Bruce Newman talks about how to meet the most common errors. Here are some notes to help me keep this valuable advice in mind.
First, don't mix up the work of moving forward with the strain of being stuck. Distraction is not the enemy, it's the practice. In any meditation:
"We are focusing on the object, we get distracted, we notice our distraction, and we return to our object. What changes with time is the length and subtlety of these distractions. This process is unavoidable and there are generally no shortcuts for making it easier. …You simply have to practice until it slowly improves."
Noticing and returning, we slowly disentangle from the display. Doing just this changes us. One "who is aware of thoughts is a very different being from one who isn't."
Then check how meditation may be going wrong. We use many strategies to preserve our attitudes and assumptions. They all stem from the basic confusion that generates the dream of self and world. Distractions and contractions sustain the dream, moment by moment. We focus our attention on dreaming the self, never looking back at the dreamer.
We risk waking up if we release mind's space and energy from the task of keeping us limited and lost. The mind can cleverly convince us we're making progress when we're really just battening down the hatches of self. We will try many things to stay asleep. Common strategies include:
Viewing meditation as a burden or penance
Practicing to please the teacher (on whom we've projected habitual patterns and childhood wounds)
Treating practice as a test, an ego-driven competition with oneself or others
Meditating just for worldly benefit (pleasure, gain, fame, power and glory)
These and others can be summarized in two main ways of veering off course: escape and enthrallment.
Escape
We often meditate to escape from pain (rather than turning toward, understanding and transforming it). But this leaves us lost in distraction.
As if talking to the inner child, whatever parts of us have not yet found their courage to take a fresh look at the way things are now, Bruce Newman writes:
"Things have changed. You're older, stronger, and wiser. You don't have to escape the pain anymore; it's simply an old habit you've outgrown.”
He then encourages: “Please check carefully. When any negativity arises in your mind, how do you deal with it? Do you use the Dharma to go toward or away from it?"
The "near enemy" of healthy detachment — disidentifying with the content of our experience — is disembodiment and disassociation, spiritual bypassing that lessens and dulls responsiveness to the moment. Choosing to feel deeply keeps us on the path.
Enthrallment
We can also merge with and become enthralled by the play of our own minds, obsessed with their contents. We may see these as having artistic or therapeutic value; or may just be cognitively fused with them, not noticing how we’ve contracted around them. Strong and enduring emotional states like depression can be especially enthralling. How to break the spell?
First notice your experience of being enthralled rather than mindful.
Instead of being aware of the emotion, be aware of the attachment to it.
Draw the energy of your awareness back toward the one who is aware and attached.
Consider awareness as spacious and clear; notice the emotion from within awareness.
Pray, then notice the emotion.
Whether or not prayer brings fresh blessings to transform the situation (as can happen), praying sets what is prayed about apart from you. No longer merged with it, you can now be mindful of it. Prayer could even work when the initial noticing isn't there. ('Dear Buddha, please help me to notice when I am lost in the play of mind, fused with the object of meditation.')
A prayer to the Guru inseparable from the perfect nature of our mind is even more powerful, setting deep motivation for pure practice. Here’s one by Bengar Jampal Zangpo:
Treasured teacher, I pray to you.
Give me energy to let self-fixation go.
Give me energy to be free of need.
Give me energy to stop ordinary thinking.
Give me energy to know mind has no beginning.
Give me energy to let confusion subside on its own.
Give me energy to know all experience is pure being.