Meditation is not about you

Don't go to a retreat to think about yourself

Often we approach the spiritual path or a meditation retreat as an attempt to fix ourselves or figure ourselves out, sometimes subtly and sometimes explicitly. But is that what it’s about? Isn’t that fixing and figuring out what we tend to do all day already—compulsively, reactively, and anxiously?

I don’t take not-self (anattā) as a philosophical argument on whether we truly exist or not, but as part of an ethical teaching to choose whether to identify with the content of our experience or not, an ability that of course needs training.

The nagging thought that just popped into your mind, a feeling of fear bubbling up from who knows were, the irritable mood since you woke up… Did you decide to have any of these? Did you “do it”? If not, then how is that you?! Do you know how much your mood depends on the millions of bacteria in your gut? They run the show more than you do.

We take thoughts & feelings as saying something about who or what we are, but a lot of the time that’s false: they happen on their own, autonomously. They have a history, of course, but that doesn’t mean we need to take responsibility. In meditation we discover we’re very capable of having thoughts we actually disagree with. Sometimes it’s just rubbish.

We have the freedom to take up thoughts & feelings and own them, but should we do that just because they happened in or to us? Is that enough reason? We should do it, Buddhist teachings suggest, when we discern them as interesting & helpful ideas, as thoughts and impulses to act that align with beautiful values. If they’re not, we don’t follow them. And neither do we reprimand ourselves for having had them—again, we didn’t do them. This is, I feel, the hardest part.

So next time, try responding with: this is not me, it’s my brain’s activity. Or, this is not me, it’s my family conditioning. Experiment! It’s not easy, especially when they come frequently and/or with a lot of emotion. But emotionality does not automatically mean something is true or even relevant, and repetition may only signal we’ve been feeding a habit.

As a meditation teacher, my advice would be: don’t go to a retreat to think about yourself, whether that’s finding out what’s wrong with you, or improving yourself, or “working” through your stuff… Do it to look at not you, at universal things like kindness and resistance, at the bird and the tree. Take a break from self-referential living.

This is no suggestiong to never take your thoughts seriously. But on a retreat you have the chance to train a radically different skill you can then apply whenever it’s useful—which, in my experience, is insultingly often.

You don’t need to find out who you are in order to bloom, says Ken McLeod. I find that extremely useful, and the extent of its truth keeps being revealed the more my path progresses. As I prepare to enter a week of silence, I remembered a talk I gave a year ago reflecting on this, which I titled “Meditation is not about you.”

In the next seven days, I hope to not fix or think about mysef or any of that. Gosh won’t it be nice to simply rest the mind on something else for a change…