MY OWN UNLEARNING
Almost every time I teach a workshop or lead a retreat, someone asks me how I came up with this approach to meditation. Was I taught it? The answer is “No.” Did I discover it? “Maybe.” Where did it come from then? It came out of my teaching meditation to a variety of students over the last seventeen years. That is the only answer that feels honest to me right now.
I have had difficulty finding a name for it. I have coined the term “recollective awareness meditation,” after having considered other possibilities, but have never grown fond of the name, and have found that people tend to confuse the term “recollective” with the word “reflective.” What is in a name anyhow? I think that is why some people just put their name to their method and leave it at that. But I prefer to give this approach to meditation practice a life separate from me, so it needs a name for other people to get behind and see it as their own work as well. Let me call it “unlearning meditation” for the time being, and see what emerges from that.
By unlearning meditation, I began to see what was going in my meditation sittings, which I could not see before. What did I see? Over time, I saw what I had learned as a meditation practice. I learned to focus my attention on each breath. Some meditation sittings I could do that better than others, but, for the most part, I was fairly consistent in my ability to have my attention on my breath. When I wasn't focusing my attention on my breath, I was scanning my attention up and down my body, becoming aware of my body sensations. I did these practices because I was first introduced to Vipassana Meditation through Goenka's ten-day retreats. I believed that this was what needed to be done to purify my mind, find inner peace, and become a liberated human being. Goenka was very convincing, and his method is quite powerful, as are the nine days of silence, hours and hours of sitting meditation practice, and the absence of worldly distractions.
During the time that I was doing Goenka's Vipassana on a daily basis I did not question nor examine my meditation practice. It was enough I was doing it and getting a great deal out of it. At times however, I saw that the meditation practice was doing other things than it was supposed to, and some of it was not that good for me. To stop doing what was not good for me meant not meditating any more. I could not do that and had no ability to extract only what was good and discard the rest. I did stop scanning my body after several retreats, for that was creating much of my problems, as I was experiencing severe bodily pains, shaking, twitching, and my emotions were becoming strongly felt as physical sensations (anger, for instance, would easily produce pain in my head and limbs). Being with the breath however contributed to those and other problems at times, and so it was not the solution, but was all that I knew at the time.
I did not know how to unlearn what I had learned as a meditation practice, and no one I encountered had any advice to give, except to stop meditating or do another form of meditation. I did not want to change my meditation practice, for it was precious to me, and stopping meditation was totally out of the question. What I did was learn another meditation practice, however reluctantly at first.
This new meditation practice was the Mahasi Method, otherwise known as “Satipatthana Vipassana” or just plain “Vipassana.” It was distinctly different from Goenka's Vipassana. First of all, one observed the breath at the abdomen instead of at the nostrils. That shift was hard for me at first, but once I got used to it, my breathing slowed down and became much more serene. Instead of scanning the body, moving sensations up and down it, I just became aware of my body sitting. This shift of focus, from inside of my body (sensations) to outside of my body (bodily contact points and posture), allowed the sensations in my body to come and go as they would naturally, which had the overall effect of “normalizing” my bodily experience (I will talk about what I mean by this phenomenon later). Other instructions in this practice were new to me, and I found them to be good things to do. Still, I persisted in holding my attention at my nostrils for many of my sittings and occasionally scanning my body; I did this mainly because I held onto the practice I so cherished for nearly a year. I was still loyal to my old practice and teachers.
I gradually abandoned all of the Goenka Vipassana practices in the ensuing months of intensive meditation practice. I learned the new instructions and applied myself to them with great effort. I noted my mental, emotional, and physical experience according to the way I was taught, which was to label the experience with a word repeated twice, such as “thinking, thinking” and then return my attention to the rise and fall of my abdomen as I breathed in and out. I tried to keep up with all aspects of my experience in this way throughout the day. I closely watched my attention and where it flitted off to next, not allowing my mind to wander or for any thought to stay for more than the moment required to recognize it, note it, and have it pass away.
This was a far more mental, far more demanding meditation practice than the earlier one. On occasion I would just get so exhausted from all the observing and noting, and just sit with a loose awareness of my experience. But then I was doing the instruction wrong, and so those sittings did not really count. There was this divide between doing the meditation practice right and doing it wrong, and whenever my mind wandered a lot, or I got tired, or bored, or restless, and could no longer keep up the strenuous observation of experience, I saw myself as not being mindful.
At that time I was living as a Buddhist monk in Sri Lanka, residing at the main Mahasi Meditation Center there. I stayed there a year and began teaching this method to others after about six months. Towards the end of that year, I started questioning what I had learned as a meditation practice, but from a different angle than before. I was not experiencing any great physical, emotional, or mental problems from my meditation practice, so I had no pressing need to change it or even look at it. For the most part I was quite content with focusing on my abdomen, noting my experiences, and trying to be mindful all of the time.
What I began to see was harder to bring into view; I could not get at it clearly. It was not until some months later, when I had shifted to another monastery which afforded me greater solitude and opportunities for study, that I began to see what I could not before in my meditation practice. In simple words, I realized that my practice was inauthentic. To someone else that might have been a minor point. But for me it was a startling revelation.
It came about poignantly one day. I had been doing some work for the librarian, who was a fairly intimidating and demanding monk, often wanting more dedication to the upkeep of the library than any of the monks were ever willing to give. I kept finding myself noting, “anger, anger” and “irritation, irritation” when I was in his presence, while at the same time I would smile and be as friendly as I could possibly be. Then one day, after working in the library (where I arranged the Indian and Burmese editions of the Pali Canon, since I could read those forms of writing), I went back to my hut to meditate and found myself sitting with my feelings without noting them. As I stayed with my irritation and my anger, I just simply allowed myself to entertain the thought, “I don't like him.” The truth was I didn't like him. All my attempts to appear friendly were a sham. In my heart, I felt only dislike, resentment, and ill-will towards him. Why couldn't I just be honest with myself?
This is a question that is difficult to answer, for there are many reasons why we can't just be honest with ourselves. But how was my meditation practice contributing to my lack of self-honesty, and to the furtherance of self-deception? That was something I could examine both within myself and with students of mine.
What I began to do was thoroughly unlearn the noting practice, for that was the main culprit. Touted as a true present-moment awareness practice, it was anything but “true.” Noting thoughts and feelings as “anger, anger” and the like was just a way to distance myself from what I was actually feeling, which was far more diffuse, vague, undefinable, and intensely real than any single word could get at. To call what I felt towards the librarian monk “anger” was to miss the nuances of the experience: I felt a dislike for him when I was around him; I had a distaste for the way he talked to me and tried to manipulate me; I was inhibited from expressing any “negative” feeling towards him and so hid behind a made-up positive feeling; and I had sensations of intense irritation throughout my body in his presence. The experience was much fuller and broader than any one word could capture. To reduce such experiences down to a single category of experience then seemed to me like an act of self-deception and over-simplification.
When I saw my students at the time, which numbered one or two, I began to listen to their experiences in a new way. What were they really going through in their meditation sittings? And not just for a small part of it (the few minutes of a sitting which fit precisely into the meditation method), but the whole sitting from beginning to end. I extended my interviews to an hour long and asked all sorts of questions about what they saw, what they did, how they felt, and what they were learning about themselves.
I abandoned the notion of being in the present moment altogether, for the mere idea of being in the present got in the way of a natural flow of meditative experience. Instead, I tried to support a meditation practice of just letting things happen, and then becoming aware after-the-fact. This is where I started to see the importance of recollection. If one abandons the notion of being aware in the present, then where does awareness come in? It comes in after an experience is over.
“But that is not being mindful,” I heard people say, and, to this day, I hear it often still. It is here that one takes the first step in unlearning meditation.
©2005 Jason Siff
© 2007 The Skillful Meditation Project