***Meditation: A Modern Look at the Practice and Science of Meditation

I was a meditation failure.

I began meditating at the age of eight when I purchased a "Hypnodisk" I saw in the novelty Johnson-Smith catalog. The manual explained how to induce a hypnotic trance, information which soon caused my teacher to write to my parents asking me to stop hypnotizing the class. But it also contained some basic meditation instructions I began using at that time.

When I turned 14, my meditation practice turned serious and I learned biofeedback to help me with migraines. Guided imagery, meditation techniques and basic relaxation were all included in my biofeedback training.

Next I read Autobiography of a Yogi, a book that may well have inspired more people to start meditating than any other. It inspired me, too, and I started the Kriya yoga form of meditation soon thereafter. My parents like to tell the story of how confused they were one day to answer the door to an Indian man seeking his meditation student, and how equally confused the man was when he found out I was a 15-year old youngster.

I remained an active meditator throughout high school and into college, where I majored in cognitive psychology and studied how humans gain and process information (which would turn out to be useful knowledge later). During this time, I was fortunate to become acquainted with various spiritual teachers, Buddhist monks, Hindu monks and popular authors on meditation and philosophy. Still, it wasn’t until 1985, when I attended my first ten-day Vipassana retreat, that I feel my meditation practice really became a serious one.

My experiences on that retreat make for quite a long story… in brief, I suggest not ending ten days of silence by immediately hopping on the subway in Harlem, unless you really want that kind of system shock. I’ll fill you in on the rest of that story another time. But from then on, I developed a significant practice, doing almost 20 different courses where I sat for as long as 16 hours each day. I regularly practiced at home for two hours a day, and I read every book on meditatio
I could locate, which required me to start keeping a database of my library so that I wouldn't end up with extra copies of books I'd already read (I probably had 3 or 4 copies of Adventures in Consciousness by Sri Aurobindo at one point). I also cultivated relationships with friends and teachers including Zen Buddhists, Tibetan Buddhists, Tai Chi masters, Hindu Yogis, Theravada Buddhists and Qi Gong masters.

With this kind of intense focus on meditation, how could I consider myself a meditation failure?

I’ll explain that shortly, but bear with me as I do so from a bit of a strange angle (most of what I write tends to be from strange angles). Because I knew a lot of meditation teachers, I heard a lot of their private conversations. They talked about themselves, about their students, about their own teachers and about their own practices. It was surprising to hear many conversations along the lines of:

“Students aren't achieving as much as they should be.”

“We teachers aren't achieving as much as we should be.”

“Even though we have profound meditation experiences, we still have the same problems everyone else has, including lack of money, lack of relationships and bad hair days.”

Hearing these private conversations was helpful because I was failing to get what I wanted from meditation, too. It was useful to know that I wasn't the only one; even the teachers were not able to consistently create the results we expected and wanted from meditation practice.

Yes, I might be blissed out for a while, but how was that helping my life? Was my relationship to the world or myself or other people actually different? Or was I just getting "high" on meditation, only to come down and start looking for the next "high?"

I realized it was pretty much that last one.

One of the other things I became curious about around this time was that many of the teachers said that what they were teaching their students was something different than what they themselves were doing in their own meditation practice. They said you can’t start with these kinds of more advanced practices because if you want to get from New York to San Francisco, you have to make the entire journey. But I got to wondering, "Why not just start at the Golden Gate Bridge instead?"

My teachers didn’t teach the advanced techniques first because they didn’t learn to do it that way. It wasn't how the lineage worked, and their teachers didn’t teach it like that.

My question was, so what if they didn’t do it that way?

How do you know that the person before you had the best method?

Lots of those teachers spoke little or no English. Could it be that the language issues caused them to teach something simpler? More than once I’ve seen a native Japanese instructor say more words to a Japanese-speaking student in an hour than he said to the students who spoke English in an entire year!

Ultimately, I came to the realization that my own meditation practice was founded on one central concept: That something about me was broken, and that if I meditated, I would be fixed. And maybe if I meditated with the best teacher and the best method and did it enough, I would find freedom from parts of myself I didn't like and rarely experience discomfort.

Well, in 2001 I dropped the idea that I was some kind of project that needed to be improved. Because I was practicing meditation in order to improve myself, I quit. Just like that - cold tofu… er, cold turkey.

My endless fascination with how the mind and meditation work didn't stop, however. Truth be told, once I was no longer focused on fixing myself, I had more clarity and energy to put towards my investigation of how these things really function. I no longer had anything to prove, I just wanted to know:

Does meditation really work? If it does, then how?

How do you fit traditionally Eastern practices into Western lives?

Is meditation something separate from all the philosophy about it and the teachers who are teaching it?

Since some of us meditate to relieve stress or to relax, is meditation really a good way to do that?

While my investigation has led me to some answers to my questions on meditation, the more interesting process has been continuing to explore, examine new questions, and interact with others on the subjects of meditation and the human mind. So I welcome your participation in this conversation and invite you to post your thoughts, disagreements, insights, comments, jokes, or more.