On Striving in Meditation

You are meditating “incorrectly” if you are trying to become calm.

You are meditating “correctly” when you notice that you are trying to become calm.

COMMENTARY:

• Striving cannot secure the state it seeks because striving is already the pre-reflective organization of experience around what is absent, threatened, or not-yet-achieved.

• Desperately striving to calm one’s mind can reinforce the very lack of calm that motivated the quest for calm in the first place—just as the more desperate we want to be rich, recognized, or desired, the poorer, more invisible, or less attractive we feel. Our striving keeps us hypersensitive/over-indexed on the very thing we fear; we train ourselves to detect it and become particularly skilled at how to prevent it, manage it, or hide it.

• And yet desire isn’t optional. We do not add desire to a neutral world; desire is not a response to a world that shows up on its own. Desire—and, necessarily, aversion—are how your world shows up in the first place. Before you ever reflect on it, something is already mattering more than something else, already worth reaching for or avoiding. What makes striving so difficult to notice is that it isn't an event that happens inside an already-given world, it is what was already organizing the world as given. As such, striving is not “external” to meditation, but is, rather, one of the pre-reflective habits the meditation makes visible.

• And of course, the moment we try to “fix” our striving, we haven't stepped outside of it—we’ve simply given our striving a new object: striving itself. But the desire to finally stop desiring, to arrive at some settled, peaceful, non-striving self, is still desire.

• And practice won’t ever place us outside of this structure; it can only notice that this structure is “happening”, so to speak. The point is not to replace striving with passivity, resignation, or indifference—nor is it to deny that concentration, calm, and inner steadiness have value in practice. The point is to see that no state of calm, focus, or inner steadiness can make us permanently secure against the discomfort that first made us seek it. And so the practice is not to “defeat” striving, but simply to bear witness to its many incarnations—the impulse to eliminate, acquire, perfect, transcend, control, become, etc.—including the desire to notice it ”correctly“ (such that I might become free from it).

FURTHER READING

• A Yogi's Guide to the Objective of Meditation

• Mindfulness Meditation FAQ