Meditative practice followup

A few months ago, I started blogging a bit about my fledgling Buddhist meditation practice, and then abruptly stopped. I thought I’d write just a few words about why I didn’t continue.

Over time, one of the things that I found most difficult about my practice was keeping it relatively pure. The whole point is to just sit and follow the breath with no extra motivation or hidden agenda. Given that, having it in the back of my mind to later try to explain my practice to a broad audience was at best a distraction. At worst, I worried that it might actually be hindering my progress.

After some thinking about it where my desire to explain this stuff came from, I determined that there was a root desire there to make the world conform to my expectations of what it *should* be. Which, if you stop and think about it, is just another form of greed. We often think of our desires as being about personal gratification (food, sex, cars, whatever) but that’s really too narrow a view — we’re social creatures, and our desires and aversions inevitably extend to the social sphere as well.

I suppose that sounds rather judgemental or moralistic, but it’s really not intended that way. This is just the nature of human experience, and I am certainly not exempt from that. There is probably at least some element of this greed at the root of much of my writing, whether it be discussing my latest computational vision problem at work or how I think coffee should be brewed — but at least in those cases articulating myself doesn’t interfere with the activity itself.

A frequent misunderstanding of the practice of Buddhism is that it’s about eliminating desire. As I understand it, it’s not so much that, as it is about putting desires in proper perspective. To not be ruled by them. If I have a social purpose in the back of my head during the practice, well, that’s going to be a problem. It’ll be constantly in the background, subtly influencing what I process and how I process it (e.g. the thought “how am I going to describe that”). I have enough issues meditating without adding to them.

Moreover, one of the things I’ve realized over the last few months is that the way people process the world around the world is pretty differently. I’m lucky enough to have a mind able to sit still for (average) 20 minutes a day. Not perfectly of course — many times I feel like I’m caught up with a million random thoughts for 90% of a session, but as I understand it that’s just part of the process. At least I can sit still! I’ve since learned that this isn’t easy at all for other people (the urge to get up and do something else is overwhelming) and I really have no insight at present into what would make it easier for them (they had tried most of what I suggested to no avail). So I am a bit concerned that what I have to say would act more as a hindrance to the journey of others rather than a help.

All this is not to say that I’m not happy to discuss my experiences one on one with anyone who’s interested. If you’re curious, by all means feel free to contact me — though I suspect you’d probably do better reaching out to a dedicated teacher who has more experience in these matters than I. If you can’t find one, I would again recommend Mindfulness in Plain English.