Learning instead of achieving

My previous post revolved around what meditation is, explaining it as a way to “become familiar” with certain themes and experiences, and above all, with a different way of “being with”—a more awake one. Familiarity or acquaintance is a kind of knowing, different from the analytical one.

I was trained in Burmese vipassanā and systems derived from it, which often emphasize ‘understanding’ as a goal and orientation, as opposed to ‘making the mind calm’. Now, many years later in my dharma journey, I see the good and the not-so-good in such a way of framing meditation.

That approach fit my temperament, but we know this is a double-edged sword. People naturally gravitate towards a style of practice that aligns with them—it’s inevitable and not to be discouraged. Yet that alignment relates to one’s strengths and interests as much as one’s fears and insecurities.

Our initially chosen meditation style tends to reinforce our perceived limitations—those “I cannot”s—it avoids what we deem challenging. And again, that need not be a bad thing temporarily, for it matters that we find meditation comfy and engaging if we are to stick with it.

In my first few years in the Insight Meditation world, after my teenage period with Tibetan Buddhism, I struggled a lot with tension. Every time I brought the mind back to my anchor point, a little voice said ‘try harder now’. I ended up with headaches. Finding a teacher who de-emphasised focusing eased a lot of that, and his emphasis on understanding the mind helped me, very slowly, to see that pattern in my life more generally. It shifted me from an achieving mode into a learning mode.

At the same time, another pattern was being fed and thus remained invisible: the very wanting to understand, the tendency—the need—to figure things out. Welcome to another kind of achievement.

Eventually, interest grew in more collected states (samādhi), and so began a journey to explore that orientation in a way that wouldn’t clash with my vipassanā training, but would be built on it. To allow the mind to settle requires a lot of “understanding the mind”. Yet increasingly, I decoupled that from the neurotic wanting to figure myself out, to watch patterns so as to draw conclusions about me and my life. There was a lot of selfing and anxious ambition in that.

Instead, I began to see it more as a small-scale learning about the behaviours of a puppy-like mind: what soothes it, what well-meaning but clumsy attempts at that backfire, what is a firm yet not hostile command, what makes it comfortable, what gladdens it. Through patient observation we become familiar with all that.

That knowing from repeated proximity differs in feel from working things out intellectually. Understanding is less the conscious, directed goal and more what happens in the process of helping the mind feel safe and at ease so it curls up next to your chosen anchor point.

To me, samādhi used to be an exercise in achieving, until I understood how much its practice is about the process of samādhi, not the attainment of it. The learning, which feels like a paradox—is we can get somewhere by precisely not trying to get there—at least not through the usual strategies of clinging, tensing up or scolding. In that sense it resembles falling asleep.

Very often in meditation we take up the achieving mode. Learning to recognize it every time it creeps in already shifts us into the learning mode. What would change if we saw meditation in terms of learning rather than achieving? Or our everyday practice? Because then the question becomes “What kind of attitudes and environment will help this mind learn?”

As it turns out, the Tibetans understood a lot of this when they translated the Indic words for meditation into Tibetan as “familiarizing” (bsgom). When I first heard this in my early days of practice, I couldn’t make sense of it, though I nodded along pretending to see its brilliance. Now, I’m increasingly, truly fond of it.