Restless New Moon in Libra

An article that appeared a couple of days ago in an American national newspaper — an article which was written by a practiced meditator — makes the startling claim that meditation often “doesn’t work.” What he actually says is, “The more time I spent meditating, the less value I derived from it. ” And he quotes Jack Kornfeld in support of this position: “There were major areas of difficulty in my life, such as loneliness, intimate relationships, work, childhood wounds, and patterns of fear that even very deep meditation didn’t touch.”

The author spends some time distinguishing between vipassana meditation (watching thoughts and feelings arise and pass away) and samadhi meditation (concentrating on one thing, or ideally on nothing). We might denominate these as Step 10 and Step 11 meditation. Now, the author makes an observation which may well be a key to why it sometimes seems that meditation “doesn’t work,” not only for practiced meditators such as himself or Jack Kornfeld, but for people in 12-Step programs. This is what he says:

“Mindfulness [Step 10] – or ‘vipassana’ — is a specific type of meditative practice from Theravada Buddhism. It involves learning to watch one’s thoughts, feelings and sensations as they arise and pass, without becoming caught up in them. By building the capacity to witness one’s own experience without attachment or reactivity, the teaching goes, one slowly begins to see through the illusion of permanence and separateness. [But t]he problem with mindfulness as a starting place is that it’s an advanced practice …. In my experience, concentration meditation is a simpler and more reliable way than mindfulness to build control of one’s attention, quiet down and relax – especially so for those in the early stages of meditating.”

In other words, he recommends Step 11 meditation over Step 10 meditation. Get some experience with Step 11 meditation, he suggests, and you will find Step 10 meditation easier.

But that is putting the cart before the horse. Elsewhere in these little studies, we have seen that — if we attempt to practice Step 11 without first practicing Step 10 — we will find that we end up asking our Higher Power to “fix” all kinds of problems that don’t actually exist anywhere except in our minds.  We have to become aware of our fears, resentments, dishonesty, and selfishness first, and then ask God as we understand God to remove them, discuss them with someone else, make amends, and turn our thoughts to someone we can help ….

Aha! Here may be why meditation “doesn’t work” for the writer and perhaps many others. For you can look in vain in the article in question for any notion of a Higher Power, or any idea that the purpose of meditation is to enable us to determine what actions we should take for others. Instead, meditation is represented as an exercise which is supposed to “build control of one’s attention, quiet down and relax …. In the modern world,” says the author, “meditation is far more effective as a technique of self-management [our italics] than as a means of personal transformation, much less enlightenment.”

Here is the great difference between Program and most other approaches to the meditative life. Most people meditate in order to “manage their lives,” in order to deal with “major difficulties” in their lives. But that is not why or how we meditate in Program. The entire process for us is governed by the reality of a Higher Power in our lives, for it was only through surrender to that Higher Power that we started to recover in the first place. When we do vipassana [Step 10] meditation in Program, we don’t do it in order to “see through the illusion of permanence and separateness,” as the author puts it. We do it in order to have our Higher Power remove from us our less useful thoughts and feelings, to prepare us to discuss them with someone else, to make amends, and to turn our thoughts to others we can help. We do it in order to make possible a practice of Step 11 that is concerned with determining our Higher Power’s will for us and getting the strength to carry that out. And we doStep 11 in order to prepare ourselves for the entire and sole goal of Program, which is to serve others … not to gain enlightenment or manage our own lives.