What Is The Best Way To Meditate?

They say practice makes perfect but when it comes to meditation, all bets are off. You can meditate with no increase in practice skill. You can even lose skill over time. As Buddhist tradition says: “After twenty years you can finally say you’ve begun to learn how to sit. Many will take even longer.”

A feedback method stands alone as free of this problem, assuring steady, reliable practice skill increase. Here’s how the best way to meditate was discovered and how it works.

How Feedback Delivers The Best Meditation

I was trained as a research psychologist with a background in skill learning. This let me see meditation from a new perspective. It revealed a flaw in traditional methods: a lack of feedback necessary for learning.

Meditation is a skill, and practice of any skill leads to improvement only if you can see what you are doing. Shooting hoops in darkness gets you nowhere. To improve, you need to know you’re on target. The rule applies equally to meditation.

Meditation’s skill is attention, but traditional methods don’t let you know you’re on target. You sit down to attend (to a mantra or the breath for instance), but attention slips away unseen. You lose it without knowing you are losing it. Like shooting hoops in darkness, practice won’t make perfect.

Meditation needs a way to monitor attention. Surprisingly, it’s easy to find one. Feedback has been there, seen but unrecognized, since the ancient practice began. Indeed, feedback is right before our eyes!

Where to Find Feedback? Right Before Your Eyes!

Sensations of light have long been noted in meditation, but we never saw the cause of the light. We missed the fact that light is produced by attention itself. Focused attention holds the eyes still, creating a fixed image. Photo pigment is used up (like exposing photographic film). Retinal fatigue follows, and with it distortion in the form of light.

Thus light signals attention. It means you’re on target. It’s positive feedback. When your mind wanders, your eyes wander and the light disappears. That’s negative feedback. Light lets you see what you are doing and practice skill improves automatically. Producing feedback is as easy as gazing at a spot on the floor.

Focus On Feedback: The Best Way To Meditate

A spot on the floor will serve as a focus point, but Focusing Discs that facilitate feedback are freely available at the Straight Line Meditation site. Simply focus on the bull’s eye and feedback comes within seconds. Attend to the light and you anchor attention. You can hold on the way you’d grab a rope for a tow. You’re taken straight to the best meditation.

How Feedback Creates The Best Meditation

Feedback acts as a personal trainer with a constantly vigilant eye. It lets you trade hours spent meditating for minutes on target, and every minute of practice pays off. This method upgrades meditation by eliminating traditional shortfalls:

* It ends the unavoidable waste of practice time.

* It brings automatic practice skill development.

* It assures consistent, reliable progress.
It’s how well you meditate (not necessarily how long), that determines benefit. Now consider what you stand to gain.

What You Gain From The Feedback Method

Traditional methods yield rest and relaxation, often little more. Contrast this to gains from the best meditation. Imagine “a world of peace and ease,” yours without changing a thing. Imagine perfect mental balance: “a balance never upset by any event under the canopy of heaven.” Imagine if you can, Great Liberation; Great Knowledge; Great Tranquility; Great Love.

This is meditation’s promise, but great promise is rarely fulfilled. With precision guidance from feedback, it can be. Now you can aim higher. Great benefit awaits the best meditation, and the best meditation requires feedback.