Expansiveness is the Lifeblood of Meditation

A question came the the other day that made me think.

It was about a very common problem to do with uncomfortable tightening of the breath each time the practitioner meditates.  I won’t relate the whole exchange, because it was quite long, but in part his question was:

“… whenever I observe the breath, either at the nostrils, in the chest or the rise of the stomach, I get very tense. I notice the tenseness in my face and particularly around my eyes. In my early days of meditating, I’d just push on with this and didn’t pay it much attention. I’d often get very frustrated, but carried on anyway.

More recently, I’ve noticed that my observation of the breath causes it to change in some way. I’m thinking that subconsciously I make it harsher or stronger so that it’s easier to observe. I can’t seem to just let the breath arise and allow my mind to ‘rest’ on it. It just seems to want to grab the breath and control it in some way.

 This problem has caused me to give up meditation for many years at a time because it was just too stressful and difficult…”

And my reply was:

 “Your problem is quite common among Westerners. I put it down to our habits of control. We try to control whatever we pay attention to.

As you said, when you’re not paying attention to it, the breath is fine – relaxed and deep. But when you begin to meditate and pay attention to the breath, suddenly it’s as if you’re ordering it to march in step to some expectation of ‘how the breath should be’ – forcing it to be deep and regular. Forcing it to be ‘relaxed’.

The breath, when left to itself, is as changeable as the weather – as it should be. So when you assert an unnatural kind of symmetry to it, an uncomfortable reactive loop appears, which ties us in knots around the simple act of breathing.

So then, what to do? 

Well, when the tightness happens, forget the breath for the moment. Focus on how you’re relating to it. This is because a large part of the problem is the intensity of your attention. So you need to find some way of lightening your attention.

When this happened to me, the way I dealt with it was, every time I found the breath tightening in response to my attention, I would immediately let go of it and expand my attention outwards to the whole body – feeling the whole body sitting, and the general movement of breath within the body.

In response, the breath would always loosen and relax, at which point I would gently pull my attention back into it … until it began to tighten again, when once again I’d let it go and go back contemplate the entire body.

 In this, it’s a bit like training a horse to be ridden – slowly coaxing my attention to learn how to ride the breath without dominating it.  Teaching it to observe without an agenda – to simply feel the breath move without  trying to make it behave differently.”

(ref previous posts: ‘Tightness in the Breath’)

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 After I wrote that, I got to thinking about the bigger picture that this particular problem sits within. Put simply, there is attitude we need that’s essential to efficient meditation. And it can be summed up in one word:

‘… Expansiveness …’

Put simply, and speaking generally, we should try to meditate as an act of expansion. Otherwise it isn’t meditation.

But let me explain from the beginning.

As I see it, there are basically two states of being in a life. We are either in expansion, or we are in contraction. That is, we move between expanding outwards and into our life experience, or we’re contracting away from it.

When we’re in an expansive state we’re exercising acceptance, love, happiness, kindness, generosity, innocence, surrender, acceptance, tranquility, empathy and so on. To expand is to not hold back, but to give out – to take a chance, to risk, to accept, to act outwards without fear. In expanding outwards we forget our limited sense of ‘myself’ and become part of something greater – whether as part of a loving couple, or the comradeship of a group, or simply expanding into life and the universal flow in one way or the other, as can happen in sport, art, work and so on.

Contractive states are the opposite. They are fear, anxiety, control, suppression, resentment, loneliness, envy, greed, neediness, defensiveness … you get the idea. Contraction is a tense and wary state in which we’re coming from self-consciousness and defensiveness. When we contract we become separate from everything. Imprisoned within our conditioned self, we’re trapped inside the conditioned delusions and fears we have developed throughout our life.

Contracted people need a lot – they build walls, both real and metaphorical. They react defensively and spend a lot of energy on hiding. Even within themselves they need lots of stuff to fill the loneliness and isolation they feel – to insulate themselves from the things they fear or hate – to help them forget what make them so anxious.

In general, the kind of culture we live in encourages contractedness. Indeed, the entire spinning machine of our modern civilization depends on us living in a contracted state of being. To this end, a lot of resources are spent on creating contractedness in people. Governments and corporations use anger, fear and divisiveness to guide and control people. Social media creates envy and rage. Advertising elicits fear, competition, greed and so on.

Why?

Because contractedness creates consumption. Contracted people need to consume. They need to compete, fight, acquire, keep and protect. And the machine of our human world needs us to keep consuming. 

As such, given this conditioning, one of the most common mistakes most people make when they first come to meditation is to treat it the same as everything else they do in their life. They try hard to succeed at meditating – to achieve – to win at it. And that’s entirely logical in the culture we’ve been born into. We’ve been trained to do exactly this in our life – ‘getting’ what we want – ‘achieving our goals’. And so, it makes sense that we bring the same desires and ambitions to meditation.

But I can tell you now, and you can take it to the bank –  there is no surer way to create suffering in meditation than to start trying to win at it. To ‘get’ things from it.

Why?

Because as I said, the stillness that is the beating heart of meditation, is by necessity a completely expansive state. It can only arise from qualities of expansiveness.

So when we go at the meditation like a bull at a gate, trying to ‘get’ things, we’re instantly made separate from any potential of stillness, simply by the act of turning meditation into another competition – something to be subjugated to our will. This competitive frame of mind is an inherently anxious state – and completely at odds with the gentle act of love that good meditation is.

So here is where meditation has an important lesson for us, because it trains us to expand instead of contract. Indeed, it is impossible to meditate efficiently if we don’t learn to let go and expand. And to expand, we must learn to meditate without ambition, desire or fear. We must learn to accept and expand into reality as it is. Not as we wish it was, or want it to be – but as it is.

That’s what the meditation methods are for. And that’s the attitude the meditation methods, which have been devised over thousands of years, will respond to. They help us to expand into our conditioned Self as it is – as it has become, without fear or judgement. To accept the various nuances of whatever unpleasantness we might feel without fear or dislike, and similarly, to accept the bliss and elation we might feel with equanimity. 

Only then will stillness appear. 

Consider this – our conditioned mind is like a child. It responds to love. And it does not like being bullied of pushed around. As such, trying to ‘still the mind’ by sheer force only closes the mind up, making it fight back and creating tension in the body. If there is no self-compassion in meditation we will suffer – either that or we’ll sink into the desperate unconsciousness which many people misinterpreted as ‘a deep state’.

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So then, if you are finding meditation difficult, perhaps review your attitudes to what you’re doing, and work at changing them.

Try meditating as an act of love instead of coercion, and you might find your mind and body responding like children who are loved –  softening, becoming playful instead of unmanageable – changing with you instead of against you.

And on a practical level, perhaps consider these strategies:

KEEP A BALANCE BETWEEN ATTENTION AND AWARENESS.

Remember, there are two parts to your perception:

Your attention, which interacts with things and connects your thinking mind with the world you’re in so it can consciously process what’s happening.

And awareness, which, unconditioned and expansive, knows the wholeness of everything around the attention

These two qualities should always be present in equal measure (at least until the attention disappears back into awareness). A well balanced mind should allocate an equal amount of energy to both attention and awareness.

So when you bring your attention to the breath, don’t concentrate so hard that awareness disappears. Keep your attention light and affectionate – such that there is still a passive awareness of everything else around you as you concentrate.

After all, meditation is not a closed, contracted and unconscious state – rather it is a bright and aware state – an expansive state, in which, though the attention is still (on the breath), the surrounding awareness is bright and knowing of all that is around you.

So whenever you focus on the main object of the breath, don’t get too close to it.  Always focus from a distance, maintaining a peripheral awareness of your whole body and the environment around you.

Also, ATTITUDE IS EVERYTHING.

Treat meditation as a kind of communion with the your self as it is at any one time. Accept your self’s terms – listen to the body speak to you with sensations. Be aware of the weather patterns of the mind without engaging with them – simply noticing whether it is confused, fuggy, hyperactive, focused, calm.

And at all times, maintain an almost affectionate attitude to this conditioned being that you are.

‘Affection’ – such a beautiful word – no control, only affectionate and detached interest.

AND REMEMBER – THERE ARE NO ENEMIES IN MEDITATION.

Thoughts are not the enemy. Pain is not the enemy.

Both of these things are commonly seen as annoyances in our life, so it is our habit to try to suppress or control them in some way. One of the prime lessons of meditation is to learn that pain and thinking have a right to exist.  And in fact, they will always exist to some degree or other, because they are natural conditions of being alive.

So it is imperative that you accept them. Ironically, you will find that the more you accept thinking and pain, the less they will appear as suffering.

NEVER DO BATTLE WITH ANYTHING IN MEDITATION.

If something takes the attention away from the breath, do not fight it, or try to suppress it.

Rather, regard it with affectionate disinterest, then remove your attention from it so it either fades away in its own time, or flutters about in the awareness until it naturally disappears. Go back to the breath – always the breath.

ALLOW THINGS TO CHANGE.

If tranquility is here, don’t expect it to stay.  Don’t expect to be calm, or peaceful as you meditate.

Same thing if you feel anxious or tense. Allow the discomfort to be there, while understanding that it too will pass away. Accept whatever is happening and in time it will change.

Tranquility will disappear, and be replaced by something else.  So will discomfort.

Accept whatever is happening now. Always. Learn to stay in flow with the weather patterns of life as if passes through you.

And if the mind begins lapsing into habits of resistance, reaction or complaint, then bring the attention back to the main object of the breath and start again. The mind may continue muttering and whining in your peripheral awareness, but so long as your attention is on the breath, eventually change will happen.

Change is your friend.

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 So, to conclude, the general rule of expansiveness in meditation is:

‘KNOW WHAT IS HAPPENING NOW, ACCEPT IT, AND LET IT GO,’

 As you practice this in meditation it will slowly become a new habit in life. And as the habit gets stronger with practice, the habit of letting go will become easier, and faster.

With thinking for example – when we first begin to meditate, thinking is a terrible problem because our attention cannot detach – it reacts to everything by causing us to think about it. But as we practice ‘knowing, accepting and letting go’ we find, though the mind still thinks, and our attention gets better at letting go, the thoughts will disappear more quickly. And the more we practice, we increasingly find thoughts disappearing so fast it’s almost as if they are disappearing as soon as they have arisen – as if there is no thinking at all.

The end effect is a kind of ambient silence in the mind, like the sounds of a forest or ocean waves.

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 The only other comment I have to make is, the expansiveness of meditation should not stop when we finish meditation and stand up.

Every expansive action we make in our lives, where we give kindness, or generosity, or acknowledge someone else with a smile – any expansive act lights up our entire physiology, relaxing the body and causing pleasure, however subtle.

So we’re practicing expansiveness as we meditate, and then applying it in our life. In this, EVERYTHING we do in our daily can be a meditation. 

And what do we find as we practice this? We find that, through the law of cause and effect, as a result of our smallest actions, we are capable of changing the destiny of other people, even the world.

So try to make sure as many actions as possible come from an expansive spirit.

Thanks for reading this far … I’m sorry it’s been a long, long post.

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Roger’s book, ‘BEING STILL – MEDITATION THAT MAKES SENSE’  is available now. Just click on the links below:

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