The Way to Stillness
Question: Roger, I read your book and I get what you’re saying about how meditation isn’t all fairy dust and bliss, and how we’ve got to build a mental and physical skillset to find stillness. But one thing I’d like you to talk about is how meditation leads to stillness, because I still don’t quite understand the process, and why it works.
And my reply:
Okay … so let’s take it from the beginning. We’re born empty. Aside from the genetic habits we’re born with, we enter the world brilliantly aware and intuitively acquisitive, but without the mental and physical habits we need to survive.
So the conditioning process begins. As we pass through each subsequent decade, we gather all the mental and physical habits we need to function as members of our human culture. The motor skills come naturally, but the mental skills are taught to us – we learn to think and form concepts, analyze, remember and foresee … and worry.
We learn these things by repetition, such that the more we do them, the more instinctive they become. By our teens, all our mental functions of thinking and forming concepts and remembering happen automatically, without us even being aware that we’re doing it.
By the time we’ve reached our second decade, our worldly vehicle is complete, and we call this accumulation of habits by our name. We’re now a ‘self’ – and our conditioned habits are capable of living our life automatically, while we daydream or worry about other things.
But as I say in my book, ‘Being Still’:
“However they come, like a host of little robots, our habits take care of almost everything we do – which on its own, is not a problem. After all, we need our habits to take care of the minutiae of our life. How tedious would it be if we had to re-learn everything each time we do it?
Our problem is not the habits themselves, as much as the fact that not all of our habits are serving us well.
Throughout our life we collect many habits which can potentially ruin our health, our relationships and our life – from drug addiction, over-eating and gambling to the more destructive emotional habits, like rage and depression.
And because we spend most of each day letting our habits do everything, we lack the awareness to moderate what they do – the way they make us think and act. As such, we’re largely out of touch with what we’re actually doing, as we’re doing it.
And that makes us vulnerable to destructive, or mediocre habits strengthening with repetition, and eventually sabotaging our life.”
So then, let’s say, to curb the power that our habits have over us, we decide to learn how to meditate. To this end, our physical habits aren’t that much of a problem. It’s our mental habits that, as essential as they are in our human lives, are the most problematic when it comes to meditation.
For a start, our cultural conditioning has imprisoned us in a mental clock, in which everything we do is locked into units of time – seconds, minutes and hours and so on. This creates an underlying frequency of anxiety in our lives. And during meditation it leads us to feel impatient if we have to sit too long when we meditate. It leads us to wonder how much time has passed. It causes us to worry about whether we’re wasting time.
Also, we’ve been filled with information, such that everything in our life has been labelled and conceptualized – made into ‘thinking stuff’ – result being, we go through life recognizing things and thinking about them instead of experiencing them as vivid sensual realities.
I can relate to this with an experience I had during my first meditation retreat. I was standing in a field, taking a break, when a bird flew past – and for the first time in my life, I actually saw it fly. I saw the fluid motion of the wings and the way it kind of swam through the atmosphere, and I felt the joy that bird might have felt to soar up into the sky. And I realized, that in all my 38 years to that time, I’d never actually seen a bird fly. For sure, I’d recognized birds flying about, but I’d never actually experienced it. And further to that, I realized that so much of the rest of my life experience had also been treated this way. I’d been travelling through life instinctively converting everything into a kind of mental shorthand of mere recognition and conceptualizing – but never actually seeing and hearing and feeling what was actually there.
But I digress … back to how we’re conditioned …
We’re also conditioned to remember things past in great detail, as well as mentally project into the future – to fantasize or worry about things that are not present – all of which sucks mental energy away from the immediate reality we’re actually in.
Then there is our cultural imperative to succeed. From waking to sleep, our mental conditioning pushes us to compete and win; to work hard to acquire stuff and then cling to what we’ve won. All innately anxious mental habits.
But of course, we’re used to all this innate anxiety. After all, it’s what we’ve always known.
Nonetheless, our body, which responds to everything that happens in our mind, does not handle this anxiety well. Over time layers of tension accumulate in our body, (which, because we regard it as ‘normal’, we don’t notice) – and these layers of tension gradually tie us in knots and cause all kinds of health problems that intensify as we age.
So then, having decided to learn how to meditate, we begin.
And we immediately hit the wall of all our life conditioning – our accumulated habits. All the tension and anxiety we’ve not been aware of, it all hits us in the face, because for the first time in our life, we’re intending to do the opposite of what we’ve been conditioned to. Where we’ve been taught to be active, and think about things, and succeed and get stuff – in meditation our intention is to stop doing things. To cease from all activity. To detach from actively thinking about stuff. To just sit still and learn to be utterly, profoundly still – and remain still, no matter what happens.
And how do we do this? Well, we don’t stop anything. That would only cause more consternation.
No, all we do is, we keep detaching our attention from all the things that it notices – letting things go instead of engaging with them.
‘Letting go of what?’ you may ask.
Well … everything. Whatever our attention notices and attaches itself to, other than the breath, we must at least attempt to let go of it.
Which is why we use the breath – it’s somewhere to take our attention when it’s let go of everything else. The breath is the ‘safe place’ for our attention. It’s where our attention can learn to remain disengaged from everything else – all the things it’s usually engaged with – of time, and concepts and daydreams and worries. Of winning, and wanting and fearing and clinging – all the things that keep us anxious and in knots.
And so it is that, using the same repetition of action that we used to build all our mental habits, we now use repetition to let them go – to cause them to deconstruct a little, And the more we keep letting these habits go, the weaker they get, and the less compelling they become.
And gradually, all the things we were imprisoned by – of time, and daydreaming and worrying; of labelling and conceptualizing, and the future and the past – they become more and more transparent. And the more transparent this mental ‘stuff’ becomes, the more our body unwinds in response.
And so we learn to live with our habits, and use them, rather than be dominated by them. And we begin to experience what life is like in its raw form, before our mental habits get to it. We learn to be aware before we think. And that awareness, as bright and clear as it is, is utterly still and existentially alive.
So … that’s how it goes. Stillness becomes a core part of our life experience.
There’s so much more, of course, but what lies beyond what I’ve described is not to be made into words. It can only be experienced.
One thing to remember – what I’ve described takes time. A long time. And it takes commitment and daily practice. It’s not a quick fix. As such, there’s no point in looking for results if you choose this journey. It’s like climbing a mountain. If you keep looking for the peak you’ll only get discouraged and give up. The only way to climb the mountain is to put your head down and, step by step, be with every moment of the ascent.
This reminds me of a conversation I had with a Sinhalese monk when I first began meditating, which I wrote about in ‘Being Still’:
“He said in his quaint Sinhalese accent, ‘So what did you expect to get from meditation?’
I thought about this.
‘To have a calm experience,’ I said. ‘At the very least.’
He nodded.
‘I see,’ he said. ‘So tell me, are you a calm person?’
I laughed and shook my head.
‘And your life,’ he said. ‘Has it been calm?’
‘Oh no, not at all,’ I said.
‘Well then,’ he said. ‘How would you describe your life?’
Once more I gave this some thought.
‘It’s been a bit chaotic,’ I said. ‘Well, actually, it’s been a total roller coaster … which is why I want to learn how to meditate.’
He nodded again.
‘Okay,’ he said, ‘So after living this chaotic life, suddenly you expect to sit down and be instantly calm, and instantly different to who you’ve always been?’
I nodded, though dubiously now, because I was beginning to see his point.
He smiled and said, ‘Can you not see how illogical that is?’
‘But isn’t that what meditation is supposed to do?’ I said. ‘Isn’t the meditation experience supposed to make me calm? And what about the alpha state?’
He laughed.
‘Meditation is not magic,’ he said. ‘Each of us are what we have made ourselves to be. Nothing can change that. So forget about alpha, beta, delta or whatever you’re talking about. Meditation is nothing to do with those things.’
‘Oh,’ I said, somewhat discomforted.
He went on. ‘Meditation teaches us to experience the truth of what we’ve become, and what we are. Only then, when we learn to be still and feel the truth of what we’ve become, will mind and body naturally readjust themselves.’
I found myself struggling with this.
I said, ‘So you’re saying that all the pain and thinking that I experience when I meditate, is because of the kind of life I’ve led?’
He smiled and nodded.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It is the chaos of your life as it has been retained in your mind and your body as mental and physical habits and reactions, which appear in meditation as pain and mental anxiety and discomfort. And all you have to do is remain still, and your mind and your body will naturally readjust themselves. Eventually, they will let go of the chaos and find balance on their own. But this takes time. After all, you’ve spent a whole life creating this chaos so it will not disappear overnight.’
He paused.
Then he added, ‘Always remember, just because you feel pain and anxiety when you meditate, does not mean stillness is not here. Stillness reveals whatever stands in its way. And stillness will renew you on every level, so long as you keep going.’”
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Roger’s book, ‘BEING STILL – MEDITATION THAT MAKES SENSE’ is available now. Just click on the links below:
AUDIOBOOK (including ebook & MP3 exercises) – AUD $25.00
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