This is the year I have waited for ever since I met the internet in 1999. The year the internet trains us to doubt ourselves.

I just couldn’t fathom how the energy of instant information could go any other way than coming for our throats. Now we are facing the monster, and we don’t even know how big it is, because we don’t have access to the zoo that bred it.

But we do know that it is almost only seen as a problem that needs a solution. But the solutions aren’t coming from outside, because nobody has the money or the power to do anything about it.

It’s up to us, even without money or power, to do something about it.

And we don’t have to be creative, we have to be decisive. This is not a time that is going to meet its hero in the discovery of new solutions to new problems. The new problems are not problems, they are attacks. The main weapon is deception and sowing seeds of doubt and disbelief. Of exhausting our capacity to even think about resistance. You know: blitzkrieg.

How do we arm ourselves against a blitzkrieg of deception? (I’ll tell you in a moment.)

I don’t know of any modern methods that arm us against this turn toward deception. Abstinence could help, but it isn’t practical when all of our finances and communications have been sucked into the cloud and made us dependent on WiFi.

But all of this is so fresh-breakingly new that “modern methods” haven’t had time to show up, much less refine themselves, prove themselves, and build a loyal following. Especially with the speed of AI building itself demonically behind the curtain of private enterprise. Today is different than yesterday. Next week, next month, what will be happening?

We don’t have a modern solution. If we did, the problem wouldn’t be as overwhelming, because we’d have something to do about it. We don’t seem to have that yet.

But we do have a solution, it just isn’t “modern”. It’s ancient. In fact, the solution has been the solution for all kinds of scary crazy things that have happened when people got into trouble and made the world unlivable. It’s a fresh solution for each new generation. And the solution never changes, it holds its course through time.

The solution has been here for a long time.

That solution is meditation training. The purpose of meditation training is to develop the aspect of our intelligence which sees what is real and distinguishes it from what isn’t. Once that is established, meditation training starts in on building our character, erecting strong ethical boundaries of what we will engage in and what we will refrain from, and it leverages incredibly powerful intentionality to keep us strong and getting stronger. Meditation organizes the forces of our life like a construction crew, bringing in strength, electricity, planning, and makes safety happen. And this makes a future very workable.

In a sense, meditation, if taken far enough, makes us antifragile. (Antifragile: able to improve and strengthen because of stress, uncertainty, and disruption—not despite them.)

Meditation works. It’s one of the few things that outperforms our wildest expectations. It doesn’t make our dreams come true, but it opens us to a dimension of ourselves that positively makes everything ok. No matter what comes, no matter how much AI insanity or fundamentalist insanity is aimed at us, there is a dimension of ourselves that is positively not afraid of it, or of anything else. That’s our buddha nature.

Meditation protects us from nonreality. Not just from tech bros and their sinister magic. It does that first because (in our case) that threatens our integrity. Until we have re-established our integrity we won’t be able to access deeper ground through meditation. We have to be sane and dignified to make this journey.

So meditation protects us from the forces that are burrowing into us to disorganize us. It does this by strengthening us from the inside out. But once that’s done, it really begins to rehabilitate us. Beyond this inner strengthening, meditation introduces us to the depth of what we are.

And as you know, this “what we are” has been a big deal in human history. This is, after all, the tradition of waking up, becoming wise, becoming enlightened by directly seeing what we are. Which isn’t going to happen without meditation, otherwise it would. (And it doesn’t — don’t believe the hype.)

Enlightened in this sense doesn’t mean whatever we want it to mean. It doesn’t mean “a little wiser with age” and it doesn’t mean “in the know” about what’s really going on in the world. It means something far deeper, and far outside what we are used to hearing about all day every day. Enlightenment is the meaning of life, and even though we only know how to make jokes about this as a naïve concept, millions of people over thousands of years were not joking. They were waking up. Treat it as a joke, and a joke it becomes. What a terrible loss that is. Usually jokes are fun, but not this time.

Treat it as real, treat it as significant, and watch what happens to your life. Enlightenment wouldn’t still be a thing if it weren’t associated with so many outstanding people from every age, people who practiced and developed through meditation.

So this is the year to begin meditation training and sharpen your inner strength, if you haven’t already. But before you do, you should know something.

The hype ain’t real

There are two ways to come at meditation.

1. You can do it on your own terms.

2. You can do it on reality’s terms.

The first isn’t worth much, but it’s how most of us begin, probably because we listened to some hype. Could be new hype, like people pushing Headspace and other meditation apps. Could be Instagram slop.

New hype is shallow and springs up to draw attention to the person sharing it. It is all about their life, how things are going for them, how awesome, how game-changing their new routine is, and how meditation has been critical to their success. For those who know what meditation really is, this level of misguidance is obscene.

But it also could be old hype.

The first book I read about meditation turned out to be this thing. Yes, I would tag Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda as old hype. It is a never-ending source of fascination for people who crave “spiritual experiences” and “god realization” — with plenty of miracles. It wasn’t a book that existed merely to inform the reader about Indian spirituality. It was an ad. A long, long ad. The point of the book was to move people toward the organization that published it, to sign up for its correspondence course (remember those?).

To make this offer irresistible, it took every part of the meditator’s life, and hyped it beyond all recognition. It painted a picture of meditation that sounded like one long spiritual ecstasy. Its kind of shameful.

After more than 30 years of practice, training, teaching, and collaboration with other practitioners, I have met nobody of any real experience who still takes this book seriously. Many of us loved it in our early days, but then realized what it was.

But it is still popular, particularly among people who don’t yet know how to recognize hype. Or people whose life is about hype. Like the guy who invented your smartphone, the thing that makes meditation almost the only thing left to keep you safe.

In a way, Autobiography of a Yogi started the hype train. This may be a gut punch to some readers. I was gut-punched in that very way many years ago. I was a born-again yogi in my 20s after reading this book and believing that it was what meditation is all about. (I cringe writing this.)

But I still liked reading it, and I credit it, along with certain plants that grow all over the world, with inspiring me to look further at life.

It has some good points, too, and can be inspiring. But so much of it is hype; it just can’t be taken seriously at this point in time where meditation has had 80 years of dedicated transmission and responsible practice. The hocus-pocus of Yogananda’s presentation has not aged well. Want to look a little simple? Talk to your most intelligent friends about nearly anything in Autobiography of a Yogi. Or, talk to a genuinely masterful Tibetan meditation teacher about the same.

Many times in my years of teaching I have had to help people who got their start with Yogananda come down to earth and let go of their fantasies, their cravings for experiences of visions, energies, immortal masters calling to them across lifetimes. Before, I thought it was just me, that I went too far in believing Yogananda’s book. (And I am careful here to say his book, not him. I have heard, but don’t know with certainty, that his original manuscript was doctored to make it popular. If that’s the case, who knows what he was really like?)

Cut through that hype

This childlike gullibility is what prompted Chogyam Trungpa to focus exclusively on the idea of cutting through “spiritual materialism” in the 1970s. The world he and other legitimate yogis from Tibet found when they came here was one saturated with the fantasy of meditation that Yogananda, probably unintentionally, set in motion. From there, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi took over and made millions. Then Sai Baba, and now Sadguru. Hype and fantasy, never aimed at critical thinking people, always aimed at the gullible. If you aren’t gullible, you don’t listen to the likes of Sadguru, you just click away from his face when you see it before you have to listen to him making stuff up.

One last thing about Yogananda (this was not intended to be a post about him or his book). As I said above, I liked reading it a lot. I also liked that it pointed me to non-hyped figures, such as Ramakrishna and Ramana Maharshi. Yogananda had a generous spirit.

His book, however, reads like a manifesto for the born-again. Tired of the American-dream-rat-race-get-a-Cadillac vision? Just seek “god-realization” and be at one with Christ and Krishna, who as it turns out, are and always were, exactly the same. Yogananda acts astonished that we all didn’t know that the Bible was written by yogis like himself who practiced in exactly the same way he tells you to. He also suggests that all his teachers were reincarnations of biblical figures.

Yet, I recently picked up an original edition, with fewer posthumous additions and Christian appeasements. I started reading it last month, and just…couldn’t. The mashup with Christianity is so overtly pandering that I feel dirty reading it. He’s making stuff up. Or maybe it wasn’t him, maybe it was his editors. I don’t know.

Hype vs. Real Talk

So that is the hype side of starting meditation: it confirms what you want meditation to be: an exciting experience without needing drugs. It creates easily imagined outcomes that make sense according to its own mysterious logic.

It’s just that none of it is real, just hyperbole and fantasy.

So what is real meditation?

Real meditation is meditation not on your terms, but on the terms of the way things actually are, and the way experience unfolds when you begin to unwind your confusion skillfully, which is what meditation instructions have always been for.

Not for creating mystical experiences, not for stimulating currents of energy in your spine. Not for seeing visions of gods and goddesses, or looking into past and future lives. Not for feeling great, not for looking radiant. Not for living forever.

Those are what meditation is not for.

Meditation is for preparing yourself to come face to face with the naked reality of being, without concepts, without any support whatsoever. It takes courage and discipline and above all, training. It’s hard to hype this, just like it’s hard to hype growing up.

Meditation is not on your terms because your terms are the terms of confusion and fear and getting things wrong again and again.

Remember: you didn’t get into the bind of your life right now by meditating your way there. But you did get into this bind on your own terms. That should be enough to stop you in your tracks. At least it should be once you see it.

But what if you can’t see it? What if you just don’t understand what your terms are doing to you? You’re in luck.

Meditation will help you to see it. Then you can begin to wake up much further, even all the way (which is what enlightenment means).

How do you know hype from reality?

It’s easy.

Let’s use the term hype for what we can all probably recognize as hype. Marketing speak. Persuasion. Promises and excitement.

And let’s use the word reality for the actual teachings on meditation that come from reality and the traditions that help you into it.

The teachings on meditation come from the body of knowledge known as dharma. Dharma means, essentially, the practical knowledge for waking up. A good translation these days might be “real talk.” Someday I’ll make a stronger case for that.

Hype is never about reality. It’s about unreality.

Dharma, the teachings of meditation, is always, exclusively about reality.

Hype

Hype talks about experiences, things you can imagine and desire.

Hype is always about everything that doesn’t really matter and couldn’t really matter because it isn’t true. It’s inflated. Hype is a form of deception.

Reality

Reality talks primarily about the challenges of using authentic practice to discover reality and wake up. Beyond that, and in a much deeper level of discussion, reality talks about the nature of reality, of seeing it directly and thereby letting go of confusion.

Real talk about real meditation doesn’t read like an advertisement. It reads like a diagnosis from a specialist.

It doesn’t ramp you up, it slows you down. If you take it to heart, you begin to change your ways. You expect fewer of your dreams to come true, and care less and less about them because you see them for what they are: dreams. If dreams can come true then they aren’t dreams. But dreams are dreams. Practicing reality, which is what meditation really is, lets you begin to see the reality that is already true. And it enables you to see right through dreams as they appear.

Early on that takes effort; a lot of effort. Later, it takes no effort at all. You see, you know, you are beginning to wake up.

In a sense, the first task of real talk about discovering reality is to show you the illusions you have bought into, and to remain at your side while your vision clears. Once you have taken the time to learn it honestly, meditation is always by your side, but not as a crutch. It is more like a map.

Whose terms make the most sense?

When you meditate on your own terms, you don’t really meditate.

Of course you can call it whatever you want. But centuries of meditators would not call what you are doing “meditating.” They would just describe it as fantasy, as thinking, as self-delusion. Nobody cares when you meditate on your own terms, it’s like you have opted out of the challenge of waking up and opted in to the promotion of your dream world. And nobody is going to rescue you from self delusion, either. That should give you chills. It gives me chills.

Real meditation is not available to us on our own. It is a pathway to reality that begins right in the very center of our blind spot. We need a helper, a teacher to point it out. That’s how it works.

Waking up is up to you. And of course, you need somebody else to help you see the path to waking up. So it is up to you, but you need help. And this isn’t a contradiction.

And trust me, a lot of us in the meditation community spent a lot of time in the hype dream of spirituality, the type Yogananda’s book encouraged in the 1940s, all the others, up to Sadguru today, continued. I sure did.

Most people in the West who have successfully taken up the real practice of meditation started out following purveyors of hype. They were the easiest to find, they were in our face on every bookshelf, leaping forward whenever someone asked someone about meditation. Chances are, you would be handed something full of hype.

At some point, we had to wake up and get help, just like we do when we’ve been drinking our life away and decide to stop with the help of a group, a set of friends who only ask that we own up to our actions.

Hello, my name is Jeffrey and I believed a lot of the bullshit put in front of me by sneaky spiritual-seeming hype peddlers.

We are no better than anyone else, we all made the same easy errors. Eventually, we got wise and learned the real thing. Takes time, takes facing fears, takes perseverance. But waking up is waking up, and once you get a taste of what that means, it doesn’t matter how much it takes. You’re going to do it.

For 2026, give reality a try. Otherwise, along with your mind being infiltrated from the outside by AI and all of its deceptions, your meditation, which should be your protector from delusion, will be working against you from the inside.

Yes, give reality a chance.

I spent the summer (2025) traveling between retreats in California and Colorado, where I spent weeks with my teachers and colleagues — meditators I have known much of my adult life. I’ve been doing this for 27 years. It used to take up the entire summer, but now it all happens in 3-4 weeks. I look forward to meeting up with everyone from around the globe, even if we have less time than we used to.

All of us are clear that we grew up in a time where getting good training was easier than it is now. Somehow, it was also inexpensive which meant seminars and retreats had great attendance. There were a lot of people on the scene back then, and a lot of places to gather.

I wasn’t alive during the music festival era of the 1960s, where all the great music group would assemble for multi-day festivals like Woodstock or the Monterey Jazz Festival (where Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin made their debut, playing alongside Ravi Shankar and the Mamas and Papas). But I think there are some similarities to the meditation scene of the 1980s up until the early 2000s. All the great teachers from the great traditions would host gigantic training seminars. People would camp for an entire summer, meditate and study and mingle. Many accomplished teachers would come together, teach their specialty topics for a week or two, and then another teacher would take the lead.

This was the world that produced most of the well known western teachers we’ve all heard about. These were the pioneers, the Silent Generation and the Baby Boomers. They are now in their eighties or older. Many are gone.

Then the world shifted

All that changed, gradually, but became visible around 2005. Retreats were more expensive, teachers didn’t travel as much, many passed away, or had aged out of the ability to fly from Nepal or Tibet on a regular circuit. Life was busier, and whatever it was that allowed so many people to dedicate entire summers to meditation retreats and seminars, vanished. People couldn’t take as much time off.

I was still a graduate students, so I had all the time in the world.

From that environment, many enthusiastic students were mentored to become the next generation of teachers: the Generation X cohort. I was one of those. So were many others who are teaching today.

We seem to agree that those starting out on the path now have a different landscape to navigate. There is a mixture of not enough long term training, and far too many short-term options to choose from. Decision fatigue sets in. Or a smorgasbord approach of taking what looks good at the time.

The publishing industry loads up shelves with new translations for specialists, new public facing books for beginners, and in their wake, new weekend programs built around a book launch.

And things that were kept behind traditional boundaries are now available to anyone.

It used to be that certain texts or teachings were open to you after training and preparing for them. It could take years to earn access to advanced topics. It had always been that way, and it was a good thing. You were given what was relevant to your stage of training, rather than titillated with exotic practices.

And that certainly changed. Now people start out however they want, whether they have the background to support them or not. It never ends well, but they don’t have anyone helping them make good decisions. It’s far too self-guided to be effective. Teachers need time with students to help them ease in. Books aren’t a substitute.

The infinite availability of information suggests that what used to take years can now take days or weeks. As if somehow we are all ready for everything, no preparation needed. As if the development of skill and understanding was, all along, a lack of information.

How to learn in 2025?

If you take time to find the resources, meditation can be learned the way we learned it, going through the tradition of texts and commentaries and pairing it with practice retreats. It can also be learned more simply by spending time consistently with accomplished teachers who offer small steps in sequence over a number of years. It doesn’t matter.

But I don’t see many of those opportunities open to new students. The world has changed, and the great lineages that cooperated in the 20th century have been fragmented by the marketplace. Meditation is still in the world, but the methods for learning it need to come back for a world that wants to learn from the beginning.

I did what was available to me. The fact that so many universities had dedicated meditators among their faculty made it easy for university students to learn in a college setting. This meant visiting teachers, Tibetans, Burmese, Japanese, could enrich our education in a setting that made learning easy. The international meditation community was born from this. It tended a little bit toward academia, but it still managed to encourage actual meditation training opportunities.

Some of my friends found an alternate route. They traveled to Nepal, met realized masters like Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche and Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, and lived near them for a decade or more. They learned the path within a fully expressed society of great meditators living in meditation cultures. I kind of envy them, but they have shared nearly every story they can remember, so I benefitted too.

Altogether I spent 10 years in full time study of texts and commentaries under the best teachers I could find. Toward the end of that period I began another 10 years emphasizing retreat training. I was not alone.

Many of my friends did the same, and when we see each other we can speak the language of meditation without needing to slow down. We became fluent, just as every meditator whose practice reaches any degree of fulfillment is. Meditation is a knowledgeable pursuit, and once the knowledge begins to gel, you have a second language you can use among other meditators. It is also the language you use to ask for instruction from teachers.

By language I mean something like a technical vocabulary. You understand the experience of the mind, the methods of meditation, the stages of the path, and you can formulate a question or statement precisely. It helps. Over years of practice and study you come to speak this language naturally.

Well trained meditators know what they are doing the same way scientists or craftspeople or surgeons or physicists or translators or filmmakers or composers know what they are doing.

The burden of popularity

Once meditation became a popular pursuit, many people moved toward it thinking it would be easy. It was not what they expected. They didn’t necessarily want to learn anything sophisticated, but the advertisements didn’t tell them what it really takes.

And what it takes is time. And practice. And community.

And teachers.

And to someone who wants immediate solutions, this isn’t that. It seems inconvenient and time consuming. It’s hard to put this recipe in an app.

This led to the dumbing down of meditation. If people didn’t want something sophisticated, why not remove the sophistication and see if they’ll still buy in?

And that is the landscape we have now: a marketplace crowded with so-called meditation training that has had all of the depth and challenge (and knowledge) washed away. And to make it easier still, it was put into apps. The public, apparently, never saw the switcheroo.

New approaches from a new generation

But there is a new generation of teachers trained in the old way. Most of us are middle aged, and have lived through the changes that have impacted us. Social media, rising expenses, busy lives becoming busier. We’ve all seen the ravages of the world we knew.

It takes a long time to develop as teachers in the old way. When people are finally ready to teach, what world will they step into? They face a world unlike the world their teachers knew.

When our teachers came to the West from India, Tibet, Japan, Thailand, and Burma, they stepped into a world they knew nothing about. They trained us to teach as natives of our culture. It was expected that we would be able to teach more easily because we knew our own world better than they did.

But nobody saw the changes coming our way. Now we, the teachers from these traditions, are stepping into a world that nobody understands. We are just as unprepared as our teachers were.

Teachers have to adapt. This history of meditation shows the ways that teachers did this. Moving from one culture to another is nothing new for meditators. It’s been happening for thousands of years. It takes time — an old estimate is that it takes about 300 years for the teachings to fully take root in a new culture. We are less than 100 years in.

This article outlines the approach I take, and the approach that made the most difference to me when I was exposed to it. I developed this approach over 25 years, and it continues to develop. To me, this is what makes the most sense today.

A path into practice in three techniques

I think everyone needs to learn a basic technique, an intermediate technique, and eventually, to move beyond technique. Because really, you have to do it this way, there isn’t any other way that works.

A basic technique builds stability, clarity and general fitness within the mind.

An intermediate technique leverages meditative insight to sustain deeper experience that opens the eyes to seeing how things really are.

Going beyond technique is the goal, which involves learning to sustain a genuine recognition of how things are, without dipping into effort, dualistic grasping, or concept. (This is where pure awareness traditions, like Mahamudra and Dzogchen, shine).

All these can be learned early on, but they will only enrich practice as our capacities grow into them. Very, very few beginners could use either the intermediate technique or beyond technique with confidence. They would simply become submerged in the swirling toilet of the mind and have no idea how to get out of it. That is why the basic technique makes sense.

Technique needs education

But even with technique, we have to face the facts that technique must be paired to knowledge.

Without knowledge, techniques will do nothing at all but consume your time as you circle in a mystery. We may hear stories about simple people who learned a simple method and attained awakening. But that, folks, is a story from the past. Awakened people rarely, rarely, rarely haven’t learned the language and perspective of the path. Just like very few notable musicians are entirely self taught.

We may want to be the exception, but that is quite a risk to take with our one shot at this.

I think a basic orientation makes the path more understandable. Here is what I consider a basic orientation. It is basic because it is touches on the big topics without going into elaboration. But it isn’t basic in the normal way of dumbing anything down.

Meditation is sophisticated. It can’t be dumbed down and still be what it is.

So here it is: my overview of what meditators need to know.

The big opportunity

The path of awakening is the great opportunity of life. That is what people who take it say. And everyone who’s come to its culmination in the past 3000 years seems to say this too. There really is something mind boggling about what it is, and that it has been there our entire lives without us being pointed to it by our parents, teachers, or presidents. If it were new that would be one thing, but it isn’t new, it has been thriving for thousands of years. Wow. What happened that we don’t know this?

Finding it is fortunate, but finding it isn’t enough. It still has to be walked. A path is only useful if you set out upon it.

And like any purposeful journey we take, we have stages of preparation and then setting out on the journey.

But in our world we have become enthusiastic —hyped and pumped— to jump into things without a hint of preparation. And no surprise, we have a recent track record of people who started meditation, then got disenchanted, and quit.

To cater to our enthusiasm and readiness to just dive in, meditation has been reduced to what can be learned without preparation. This is so sad, but at the same time so typical of what materialistic cultures do. We shouldn’t mistake the shortsightedness of the world we live in with the possibilities available to us. They are still there, once we look more carefully at the possibilities.

When we do, we see that meditation leads to something remarkable. It isn’t one thing among many that all lead to this same remarkable outcome. It is the one and only thing that leads to that outcome. That is why it still exists. That is why people take pains to learn it properly. There aren’t other options. If we don’t grasp this at the beginning, we lose a tremendous opportunity.

The outcome of meditation is called awakening. For nearly 3000 years meditation cultures have preserved the amazing meditation systems that lead to awakening.

These systems are intact, they are complete, and they are refined. They are ready for us — if we are ready for them.

Are we?

We are ready when we understand the stakes. If we view awakening as one of many worthwhile things we could achieve, we don’t understand the stakes.

The Prison is Not Your Home

Here’s an image.

On an island in a cold sea is a prison colony from which nobody comes or goes. Everyone is there for unjust reasons, none are actual criminals. But prison life has been rough, and they have begun to behave as captives in an unkind environment often do. They are suspicious and self-absorbed. And rough.

The prison has been a closed community for decades, with no new prisoners. There is no memory in the prison community of escape, so it isn’t something people think about.

Instead they preoccupy themselves with other things: they can behave well so they end up in a nicer cell, or earn an easier prison job. They can ingratiate themselves with powerful gang leaders in the prison and be more secure in their social standing, as long as they don’t anger the gang leaders. They can exercise and build their bodies up so that they appear more intimidating and ward off attack. This is what most of the prisoners think about all day long.

One day a boat arrives to the island, and a new prisoner is brought to the prison. This is the first new prisoner in ages, the first person from the outside world that has come into the prison.

This is also the first time anyone on the island has thought about the world beyond the prison. Many are so caught up in their prison life that they don’t take notice. But some are startled into memories of the world they knew before the island.

The new prisoner is interesting for another reason. On his way to the prison, he paid attention to the location of the island. He paid attention to the sea traffic and the various types of ships and boats that pass by the island, and those that deliver food and medicine, fuel and goods to the island. The prisoner realizes that the prison is not well guarded or fortified. He sees that escape is possible, even easy.

To this prisoner, and the few around him, escaping prison becomes more important than getting a better cell or an easier job. For the new prisoner, escape is a reality, and he plans for it day and night. For those around him, they are beginning to imagine that it is possible. Their life in the prison changes, because there is now hope for escape. Hardships are not as hard.

The day finally comes. The prisoner escapes, and those who are willing to take the risk join him. After the escape, the remaining prisoners are puzzled, but get on with their preoccupations, and eventually the escape is forgotten.

This is a similar situation to ours. People have awakened. They have left behind records and strategies so that we can do the same. Most of us aren’t thinking about anything nearly as daring as “awakening” and may just laugh it off. Others of us feel it powerfully, in the pit of our stomach: we know, somehow, that this is what we have been looking for. We long for awakening, and now we know it is possible. Most of those around us are oblivious. We are not.

Luckily for us, at least for now, we have the freedoms to pursue this journey. We can take up the methods and strategies for awakening.

Freedom from endless prison life

On the island, there was no way for the escapees to communicate with those back in the prison. Escape meant disappearing forever. But that isn’t the case in awakening. All those who have awakened continued to live out their lives among everyone else. Thousands, even millions of individuals have done this. It isn’t a goodbye at all.

Of course, it is a goodbye to suffering and confusion, but not a goodbye to friends and family.

But it is even better for us than for the prisoners on the island. Those who understand the journey are here, alive, and there are a lot of them. There are more teachers from authentic lineages than you will ever have time to meet. And you only need one to begin.

Teachers are the guardians of meditation in the world.

They have done the work of gathering together all the knowledge and training we will need. They are like doctors or engineers who train for many years in order to serve. But instead of learning conventional mainstream approved disciplines of medicine or engineering, they learned the path of meditation.

It is through connecting with this living tradition of meditation instruction that the real journey of awakening can begin in our lives.

Awakening is the core goal for our life

Awakening is the transformation our life makes possible. It isn’t like any other transformation or change or experience we could have. It is the final prize, the true treasure at the heart of your lifetime.

That is why we have thousands of years of detailed accounts of this journey, its landscape, and the best routes to follow. Studying these accounts we see clearly that the path is real. The results and final goal are also real. So it is only up to us: the path is available, the training is available, and our lifetime can be put to it.

But for most of us, the language and context of the path is distant from anything we have learned or explored.

At first the path may seem like things we are familiar with, such as religion or philosophy or personal growth. But the similarities are superficial, and once we are traveling the path on our own, we find ourselves passing the last remaining similarities to these other pursuits, stepping into something that hasn’t been mapped by our culture. We may feel alienated.

But this journeyhas definitely been mapped, just not by us. Meditation cultures who have hosted meditators for centuries hold these maps, and usually present themselves to us in a friendly, supportive manner. The path is to be shared, not held as property.

We need a connection

Gaining support from those who understand this path is the only real way to navigate the journey to awakening. People who don’t always wind up lost, spinning their wheels until they wise up and seek help. The greatest figures in the awakening traditions agree that a teacher, or a support network is critical.

Luckily for us, these are ready for us when we are ready for the path.

Starting out on this path is more challenging for modern western people than it needs to be.

It is challenging for everyone, of course, because it shows us how to reverse habitual habits and discover what is within us but which our habits had kept us from recognizing.

But for us it is additionally challenging because we don’t have a cultural context that validates this pursuit. Giving a little bit of time to meditation seems conventionally appropriate. But giving more time than that may seem excessive or extreme.

What a conundrum.

Awakening doesn’t happen through conventionally acceptable measurements. Conventional thinking is not a way into the path of awakening, it’s a way to keep far from it.

So we should take a little time at the beginning to understand the journey, the milestones of the path, and the handful of components that all meditators learn in the course of their lives.

I have spread these into four main categories, each of which is important to understand from the beginning so the path is seen and understood. But when we are actually on the path, practicing for the result of awakening, they aren’t just important, they are vital.

The Four Vital Points of Awakening

So these are Four Vital Points of the path of awakening.

First Vital Point

The first vital point of awakening is to understand the difference between two parts of ourself: mind and awareness.

Awakening takes place in awareness, not the mind. The mind is what must be traveled through in order to set foot in awareness. When we arrive at awareness we use certain instructions to stay within awareness without being pulled back into mind. Eventually, our stability in awareness is stronger than the mind’s ability to pull us back into itself, and the bridge between these two falls apart. That is good, we never needed that bridge, it only made us confused.

So the first vital point is distinguishing mind from awareness.

Second Vital Point

The second vital point of awakening is to understand the methods used to travel safely through the mind into awareness, and then to stay within awareness.

The two methods are called meditation and nonmeditation.

Meditation is training done with the mind to open a passageway to awareness.

Nonmeditation is a training done within awareness that stabilizes the experience of awareness.

Most traditions put both methods, meditation and nonmeditation, under the general heading of meditation. So, as clunky as this sounds, “meditation” has two modes within it, meditation and nonmeditation.

That’s just how language works. All of our methods and teachings are from sources written in languages like Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Pali. When we choose to learn in English (rather than learning the original languages), we end up with a handful of clunky translations that seem inelegant, but which really don’t get in the way.

The second vital point is to understand the differences between meditation and nonmeditation.

Third Vital Point

The third vital point is meditation. The task of meditation is to understand the realm of the mind, which has three parts.

The mind consists of body, subtle body, and thoughts.

The first two, body and subtle body, are called the feeling world. The third, thoughts is just called mind or sometimes, thinking. The feeling world is the most important at this stage, it is where the big gains begin.

It might seem strange to include body with mind, but from the perspective of meditation it saves a lot of time. As you begin meditation training, you’ll see why this makes sense.

In meditation we have to accomplish these things:

1. We distinguish body, subtle body, and mind from one another experientially.

2. We learn how to direct attention to each of them individually, using mindfulness.

3. We learn to sustain our attention toward body and subtle body together (the feeling world), using mindfulness.

4. We learn to release mindfulness to the point where both mind and the feeling world are seen as one arising, dissolving field of appearances.

Our main efforts at the beginning will be on the third task: to direct and sustain our attention, lightly but continuously, on the feeling world, which is the combination of body and subtle body. If we can do that, we will find the fourth task unfolding naturally.

We have to be ready

Even though meditation is something we can begin right away, we have to reconcile ourselves to what meditation really is: the reverse of what we have been doing before. If we haven’t been meditating, we have been letting our mind wander, where it has become increasingly confused over our lifetime. This confusion may not be apparent to us now, but our meditation journey will shine the spotlight on it quickly.

All of our stress, all of our unhappiness, all of our fear, are symptoms of confusion. Wandering mind has done this to us.

When confusion is eradicated, so are its symptoms. At our very core, the inner reality of our being, we are not confused, not afraid, not unhappy.

So what are we?

We are wise, compassionate, bright, and joyful. And all of that is natural to us, it doesn’t need to be maintained. It needs to be uncovered, so it can be recognized, or discovered. Our confusion is due to not knowing this inner reality, our fundamental core of wisdom.

That perspective should make it more appealing than the conventional assumption that meditation is just a way to calm us down or center us in our ordinary perspective. That isn’t what any of the ancient traditions talk about. That wouldn’t do very much for us, it would just appease us for an hour or a day. But then our confusion would return and send us back into fear and unhappiness because its root cause hadn’t been found, eradicated, or even looked for.

So for us, those who want to wake up and transform, meditation is the road to follow. We shouldn’t expect it to be easy, it isn’t a back rub. But we shouldn’t worry that it is going to be extremely difficult. Meditation has its challenges, but far more than that, it has its rewards.

We can prepare, it’s not difficult

Meditation is easier when we are prepared for it. This preparation consists of coming face to face with the realities of our life, the confusion we live within, the fear that attacks us from our depths, and the unfulfilled longing that pushes us through one fruitless pursuit after the next. And then one day that unfulfilled longing wises up and asks, what is not working?

In Finding Ground, we introduce elements of preparation throughout the initial training in meditation, so that the mind can have enough stability to stay in the face-to-face experience of the realities of life. An untrained mind has spent its entire life turning from these in hopes of a solution. But solutions cannot be found in the mind.

Meditation can’t be rushed. And it shouldn’t be overly front-loaded, which is to say that we shouldn’t take in more information than will help us in the beginning. As we develop, we will have a much better experience understanding the body of knowledge that comes along with the method.

Some traditions withhold all teachings until a student has gained initial competence in meditation. Some traditions withhold meditation instructions until a student has a full education in the theory of the teachings.

My teachers were all in between these two: they encouraged meditation right from the beginning, and then opened the teachings point by point along the way. This makes sense to me because most of the teachings are useful only after the beginning phase — they depend on the experience of meditation and the insights that come from it.

But the early teachings are very important for the first phase of the path, so they really deserve to be given alongside the initial instructions. That’s how I do it in Finding Ground.

The Fourth Vital Point

The fourth vital point is nonmeditation, the beginning of the transformative process within the path of awakening.

Nonmeditation depends on familiarity with awareness. This almost always depends on meditation, and nonmeditation is usually practiced in tandem with meditation. Without the experiential aha moments of meditation, nonmeditation can seem like an impossibility.

At heart, it is the simplest thing a person can do. It isn’t even a thing you do, it is just the natural flow of being unhindered by confusion. But that doesn’t mean it is easy to put into practice. Meditation solves that problem.

That is why most traditions only teach nonmeditation after a period of training in meditation. But some, like ours, introduce nonmeditation early, as a way to refresh and inspire our meditation path.

And then, we have the vital points of nonmeditation (oral instruction tradition).

Within the training of nonmeditation, there are several vital points. But these are usually given when students report their experience to an instructor, so the instructor can offer these points at the right time. It is almost better not to have these inner instructions than to have them at the wrong time.

In Finding Ground we use the initial points to develop the basic experience of nonmeditation, and then provide training in the unfolding of this experience as it happens. This is best done through communication, rather than reading anything and everything and applying it on one’s own.

Conclusion

That is it. I’ll return to this article after a little while to see if I still find it complete. These are my best thoughts at the moment, pulled together after hearing questions from meditation students and viewers of my Youtube videos.

I understand that greater teachers than I may choose to summarize things differently. There are many ways to do this, and the important points to one teacher may not be the same in every detail to another teacher.

But these four are important to me. When I am talking to someone who doesn’t understand these four, I can tell by their thoughts that something is missing.

People are outlining worst case scenarios for so many things, it seems like we are listening to a symphony of pain. The strings are the climate. The woodwinds are AI. The brass are the authoritarian moves we see every day. The percussion are the wars breaking out in the world. The players are the rich, the second-tier officials, and possibly, the military. The conductors are the heads of state — the most powerful individuals in the world. The audience is everyone else. That’s probably us.

The whole performance is trending toward sadness and violence, and our response right now is probably a mixture of fear and anger, or hopelessness and despair. Yes, some people are cheering at all of this, but we can set them aside as people who don’t know what they’re seeing. Is it possible they are actually right about all of this? Well, anything’s possible, but we’re going to let them make their case in their chosen channels. We’ll explore the scenario just described.

This Has Happened Before

First, this is a variation of things that have, in similar ways — though not identical ways — happened before. People have always experienced fear and suffering, oppression, and the destruction of what they dearly loved and valued. Sometimes this can be averted. Sometimes it cannot be averted.

My teachers experienced a similar societal collapse in 1959, when the Chinese communists invaded Tibet and enacted genocide in the cruelest possible way. My teachers are the ones who survived. I probably would have had more teachers if more had survived. Some of the greatest teachers of that generation died in concentration camps or were murdered by troops. It was horrible, and it resembles all the other genocidal invasions I’ve read about — from Genghis Khan to World War II to Rwanda and others.

Genocidal invasions, brutal takeovers, military coups — all this stuff is so common in the human story as to be a feature of human life. We like to think of it as an aberration. But is it? The difference to us right now is that our fears are based on outcomes that haven’t yet come to that stage. We are just afraid that they will.

Facing What We Can and Cannot Control

So. This brings us to a very sensitive point. We can face the situation openly and understand what is happening at a fundamental level. And when we do, there are two aspects to this:

(1) what we can control

(2) what we cannot control

This won’t be a suggestion to do nothing, and it won’t be a suggestion to rouse yourself and do everything you can. Those are up to you, and you’ll make decisions based on what your situation is right now. Some will want to do something, but will not have a situation where it is possible to do so. They may be sick, or remote, or emotionally unable to participate. We have to let people in these situations make their decisions without castigation.

Some will not want to do anything, but will watch. Or not watch. Again, this is their choice, and if we have emotions about it, we can end up clouding our own mind. Some of the smartest things people are doing right now would have seemed ignorant to me if they told me what they were going to do. First I would scoff at them, later I would admire them.

A Life Lived in Another Time

I was born in the late 1960s, and I grew all the way up to be thirty years old without bothering with computers. I lived in a world of analog media. A world of paper and ink, typewriters and acoustic guitars. It was a better situation than what I see young people have today, but I can’t change it.

My parents were born right at the end of World War II. They grew up in the 1950s, built their lives in the 1960s and ’70s, and are now in their 80s. They lived most of their lives in the most peaceful and prosperous time that a person of their working-class upbringing could have experienced.

Every day I read of someone who has just died in their late 80s or 90s. I think to myself, they are finishing a life just before the orchestra has begun to play. Perhaps they are lucky. Their timing was impeccable.

But I also think to myself that I would rather be alive than not alive, and if/when the world turns to darkness, I would still rather be alive.

But then again, I have a secret. I have something that makes dark times and light times more similar to one another. Lots of people have this. It’s called dharma — teachings on the wisdom nature of existence.

We really need to upgrade our vocabulary to include the word “dharma”.

In America, where I have lived my life so far, we don’t have these teachings, and 99% of Americans wouldn’t even know what I just said. They would hear this as my saying I have religion. But that isn’t what I have. I don’t have religion, and I am not religious. I have teachings on the wisdom nature of existence, which are universally called dharma.

I had to learn these from my teachers — the ones who escaped from the genocide of the Communist invasion of 1959. I have been doing this for about 30 years now. And it took me 20 years to arrive at an outlook that could see the world and not turn to hope or despair. For the last 10 years my outlook has been stabilizing more and more.

That is normal for people who practice meditation and study dharma. I am not a special case. I am not any more of a success story than those like me.

I had a lot of peaceful years to absorb these teachings, ask questions, absorb them bit by bit. I spent much of my adult life going in and out of meditation retreats where I refined my understanding. It has been at the center of my life for more than half of my life.

But that was just good timing. I didn’t need that much time. I could have learned what I learned much more quickly if the conditions had been different.

The Value of Unstable Conditions

And what conditions would have made me learn more quickly? Unstable conditions like the ones we are facing now.

When I was learning, I always had parallel opportunities tempting me. Maybe I could give up my meditation path and try to become rich and famous. Maybe I could become a rock and roll star. Maybe I could become an actor. Or a writer.

I took 20 years to learn what I could have learned in only a couple of years. True, the years of meditation probably couldn’t be condensed, but the shaping of an outlook that protects me from despair right now didn’t need 20 years.

And that is what is important in this conversation. What is in our control is more powerful than we suspect.

Practicing Worst Case Mind

It is helpful to take a worst case scenario as our case study. Just assume that everything is going to go wrong. Don’t exaggerate — just allow yourself to envision that the rest of your life will move toward the worst case scenario.

If your worst case scenario is some kind of annihilation — nuclear exchange, pandemic, genocide — then at least build in a one-year buffer. Imagine for the sake of this that you have another year.

But there are other scenarios where it is better to imagine that you have less than a year. We can talk about those in another video, or you can find resources for that level of “what if I only had a month to live” questioning. I highly advise you to replace your hope for a brighter tomorrow with a mature contemplation of darkness. Sorry to be smiling as I say that.

So, it happened. Remember, you are still alive, and you have at least a year left. Or three years left. Or five years. Or ten.

Here is the question: if the events of the world are out of your control — if you cannot shift the world toward peace at a global scale — what is left for you to do?

What Matters in the Time That Remains

What can you do? If your food is compromised, if your travel is restricted, if your lifestyle is adjusted downward — not life-threateningly downward, remember — what is left for you to do?

What important thing is still available to you with a handful of years alive?

You can’t look to your bucket list anymore if it was filled with requirements that the world is peaceful and prosperous. That time is no more. But what can you look to?

If I left you to this for a weekend, you would run through many things that would seem possible and then begin to seem unlikely. You would cross things off the list. You would narrow it down to very basic human things that are possible simply because you are alive.

And in that way, you would find yourself thinking like the majority of human beings who have lived on this planet — humans who didn’t have the freedoms and opportunities we’ve had for so long. But from that lack of options, great things emerged. It was from that bare and basic situation that the traditions of enlightenment arose.

The Legacy of the Meditators

These traditions harnessed the introspective power of meditation to look into what comes with every human life: mind and awareness. Meditators didn’t have lots of cars, lots of vacation homes, or lots of plans. They had what they had — which is what you have — although you still have a lot more than they had.

One thing you might have seen in them that you don’t necessarily see in yourself is the mysterious quality of well-being. Contentment. Even happiness. Meditators become happy as a byproduct of the way they live their lives. Even when the ruling class was cruel and distant. Even when the masses were poor and without medicine. Meditators were joyful and kind. All the recorded history talks about it this way.

You won’t find history full of angry, bitter meditators. Even when the world around them was full of angry, bitter people. And you also won’t find any historical accounts of how the rich and powerful were also happy meditators. Because wealth and power are never associated with meditation. They aren’t good conditions for the discoveries of meditation.

Wherever you see the rich and powerful gather, you should know that you simply will not be able to find good instruction in meditation and wisdom. It’s like all the places where meditation doesn’t exist have collected together — and it is convenient for you. You know what you won’t find there.

A friend of mine used to joke that whenever the sports arenas in our city are full, you know that it’s safe to go about the city and meet literate, intelligent people. The people who get in the way of intelligence are all collected together for the day in a sports arena, so the general reading level of the city goes up for a few hours. He upset a lot of people with that remark, but I still think about it.

It seems that if what most people do (whatever that is) produces good character, good intelligence, the ability to decipher truth from lies, then most people would impress us with their intelligence, character, and perceptiveness.

And if what most people want leads to happiness and well-being, then the people who seem to get what they want would also strike us as happy and well.

What You Can Still Wake Up To

Do you know what is outside of your control, or do you still need to find out? If you need more time, understand that this almost always comes through lessons in disappointment, shock, indignation, anger. It won’t be a series of peaceful insights.

But if in your heart you do already know what is out of your control, but you just haven’t accepted it yet, it may only take a period of contemplation to bring those realizations forward. You may be ready to grow up all of a sudden.

It has taken me a very long time to grow up in this way. I am one of those people who expected the people in charge to be benevolent. I never grasped that the masses would raise anyone into power who wasn’t benevolent.

I was like Linus waiting for the Great Pumpkin for most of my life, even while I was avidly reading history. My foolishness is just something I have had to befriend. It has been painful, but I am much more awake since I started opening my eyes.

And in this case, awake means: I don’t expect things from people when I know they probably don’t have those things developed inside them. I don’t expect people to be honest and compassionate and generous and altruistic if they haven’t lived their lives in a society that instills those values in them. A competitive world does not foster kindness and generosity. It’s simple, but true. A cooperative world is required to see the full flowering of kindness, to see how generous and benevolent people can become.

And I don’t expect wisdom from people who have spent their every waking hour gathering power and material wealth. Wisdom isn’t found in those hunting grounds. And wisdom takes just as much time and attention as gathering material power. So it’s one or the other.

I would like to see a world where benevolence and generosity are held up as standards of achievement. A world of virtue, a world led by people who model virtuous qualities. But that will have to await a world that can produce such leaders. For the time being, this one can’t.

Wealth and power are not associated with virtues and benevolence. At least not in any historical society I know of. The accumulation of material power at the expense of sharing has long been seen as shameful, anti-social, pathological. And in some situations, normal. So if a society instills the desirability of wealth and power — and even worse, fame — in its people, only a fool would expect to find honest and wise people emerge as its leaders.

And like I said, I was one of those fools. Not so much anymore.

Still, beneath all this, something else is available — and always has been.

Awake Beneath the Dream

The most important point I intend to make here is that no matter what our circumstances, all the way up to our last moment, we can make the move into seeing what we have never seen before. Meditation is the art of doing this. It isn’t a simpleminded thing, but it isn’t out of our reach either.

And it is important, but seemingly hard to get across, that this is realistic. It happens. It has happened to all of my teachers. It happened to all of their teachers. It happens to thousands, millions of people who aren’t teachers. It has BEEN happening for going on 3000 years. It is as real as learning to ride a bicycle.

It’s also started to happen to me, at least at an early stage. But I confirm it is real. If this early stage is all I ever taste, my life will have been lived better than anything I ever hoped for. So really, if a guy like me can do it, I think anyone else can too.

The mind that thinks is like a reflection in the mirror. The part of us that sees this reflection is not in the mirror. As long as we think we are the mind (which we aren’t), or that we are the body (not that either), we follow their lead. But we don’t get far if we just switch our thinking superficially. We can’t just say “ok, I’ll give it a try: I’ll think I’m not the body or mind.” That wouldn’t do anything.

Seeing is believing. But what sees is beyond the activity of believing or not believing. Seeing means that the part of you that can discern truth, real truth, fundamental raw truth, has come alive and seen that it is not the reflection in the mirror.

When this happens — and it will happen, and it does happen when you do what makes it happen (meditate) — you will be standing in a much bigger concert hall than just the one featuring the orchestra of pain.

You won’t be in a paradise, but you won’t be in a hell, either. You will be free from paradise, and free from hell. Free means something important: it means you are free from something you thought you could never be free from. You were wrong all this time!

I don’t like what is going on in the world either. I don’t like the people who seize power. I don’t like people who double down on lies, or who entertain themselves with escalating anger stories.

But they are playing their part in the orchestra of pain, which is doing its gig without my input. I am not making it happen, I am not conducting the orchestra, I am not marketing the orchestra.

They are not the only show in town, and I don’t have time to listen to them when there are more important things available. That is within my control.

You’ve long heard about mindfulness, and you’ve long heard about meditation. Maybe the specifics of mind and awareness were new to you, but now they all fit into a picture that makes sense, I hope.

But chances are whatever you’ve heard about meditation involved the “how-to” or even the “why-to”. In other words, technique and benefits. Because meditation has been presented to us in the marketplace, it is presented as a product: there is the thing you buy, and the reason you buy that thing.

That’s the world we live in. But it’s not the world we thrive in.

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thriving comes from a bigger view

The modern world of the marketplace can easily swallow up the meaning and depth our life could touch. If we do nothing to counter it, we could spend our remaining days shopping for solutions that promise a lot more than they deliver. We will fail to thrive, because our outlook will fail to appreciate the possibilities available for us.

Thriving doesn’t mean vibrating with the energy of a 24 year old when we are in the second half of life. It doesn’t overvalue youth, beauty, wealth, or power. It means understanding what you have no matter your age, even if you are old, nearly broke, and largely invisible. Those aren’t marks against a person who wants to go deeply into the adventure of understanding what we are. The adventure is just as open to them as to anyone. That is thriving, no matter your age.

This world we thrive in takes a deeper and more mature approach to life. It sees and respects the pattern of unfolding perspectives that come with years and knowledge. It accommodates the bigger perspective of a human life, the journey. Not just the pretty bits, but all the bits. If we are ready to take a deeper look at our life and not worry about what “stage” of life we are in, then meditation is exactly what we should be considering. It is the ultimate deep dive into life and meaning.

Meditation has never, ever been about something small and quick. There are no “hacks” or “tips” in the great library of living meditative literature.

Meditation is a product of deep maturity. It has always been something for real adults, elders. It brings us into a very deep and meaningful human perspective, and it sheds light on the confusion felt all around us. It makes us useful, and it increases our compassion for everyone and everything.

This article is part of the Meditation 101: Six Ideas to Clarify Your Practice

• Meditation is a fragile word. Use carefully.

• Mindfulness: it's been a rough 30 years.

• Mind is a little word for a big thing.

• Awareness: it's not what you know, it's how you know.

• Everybody needs a teacher, because we don't have enough time to do it alone.

meditation is for adults

Meditation reaches beyond what the immature parts of ourselves want. It isn’t a toy to rattle, it isn’t a race to win. Meditation is about timeless reality, and it is for the would-be brave adventurer. Many meditators start from square one: they have never done anything brave, but they genuinely long to before it is too late. And this is their entry point to something marvelous.

It is for the adult within us, not the child within us. The child runs from reality, but the adult looks directly into it. And this takes time. Time is something the adult appreciates, but the child does not.

Yes, it is ironic that the people most willing to put in the time of this great adventure are also those with the least amount of time left to them. But that shouldn’t get in the way.

the perspective that changes our life: path

The path is the most overlooked part of the meditative experience. But the path is where the magic is: it transforms meditation from a technique to an adventure.

The notion of path acknowledges how a meditator has begun the journey out of confusion and fear, which is a different thing than applying remedies and solutions to relieve confusion and fear. A journey out of implies a bigger vision. The path operates with such a vision, supplying a well known map and a friendly atmosphere to travel within.

The path is the journey part of the journey.

what we need: a path (not just a technique)

The path is what comes down to us when we begin our journey. And by “come down” I mean “through history” — not down from a divine source. It’s a human tradition, not a mystical tradition. It does have plenty of mystical expressions, if you are looking for that, but the basics, the stuff everyone begins with, is solid as a rock and as practical as boiled potatoes.

The full path, from beginning to end, has been understood, mapped, trained, celebrated, cherished, and carefully passed from generation to generation from the 5th century BCE, to today. That puts its origin just before the Golden Age of Greece, and well before Imperial Rome.

It’s been fresh and real for 100 generations and counting. It’s older than the bicycle; older than our ways of cooking bread. Older than any form of money or economic structures that rely on them. Older than any modern spoken language.

The path is more human than most of the things we involve ourselves with every day. That is one reason it merits our attention: just to see and understand what is so compelling that it has endured, and thrived, for thousands of years, through every type of change and upheaval, without being substantially altered.

The path is both the journey you take through your life as a meditator, and the change in your perspective about what life really is.

the journey is more than just living and dying

Reflecting on our lives, we see a journey from birth to death. While much happens in between, without meditation this journey may not unfold anything beyond a biological process.

Maybe it’s a journey of some kind. But it could be a journey into an understanding that removes fear and confusion. That’s the journey of the meditator. It takes place on a path.

People new to meditation often think meditation is a technique. And the path of meditation does involve techniques, but they are largely interchangeable. As long as you have a coherent path along which your training moves you, the techniques are all going to have passed the test of time. Practices that were too difficult, or involved too many complexities of lifestyle have been put aside in favor of what really works for people year after year. We have the best of everything that has been tried.

journey + dharma = hero’s journey

What is important, what makes or breaks your efforts, is the content of your path — the teachings — the knowledge that meditation makes you fit to incorporate.

Meditation gets you in shape to understand something bigger and vaster than anything you have understood before. The traditional word for this is dharma and it means the teachings that lead us out of fear and confusion.

Remember how we said meditation is a practice that leads us out of fear and confusion? Well, that requires that your meditation is guided along a path that leads out of fear and confusion.

And that’s a major qualification. You want a path out of fear and confusion? So do I. But not every path leads out, most lead in. And that means our path has to be guided by knowledge of fear and confusion and the journey out of it. And that, in a word, is dharma.

Dharma is the body of knowledge that illuminates and maintains a viable path out of fear and confusion. It is the distinguishing factor between a path that circles within fear and confusion, and one that leads to an exit from fear and confusion.

It is the single most important thing in the meditator’s journey.

samsara: the endless cycle

Most paths we have in our life lead directly into fear and confusion. That’s the problem.

Everywhere you look people are clamoring for you to follow their lead. But where will they lead you? Almost certainly into another neighborhood of fear and confusion. They don’t actually have a path for you that does anything new, just the same old fear and confusion all over again. The word for that, from the tradition, is samsara.

Samsara is the self-perpetuating cycle of fear and confusion. Samsara has no paths out, just circling patterns that direct us back in. Samsara is likened to a never ending nightmare that tricks us with brief moments of calm, moments which seem like they’ll last, but which eventually change into more suffering. There is no actual relief from fear and confusion within samsara.

And worst of all: there is very, very little capacity for memory within samsara. We have continual amnesia, always making the same mistakes, always circling in the same small patterns, wondering if we’ve tried that route before. We have.

Dharma is what intersects samsara and provides a way out. Once one has connected to dharma and understood the reality of samsara, they begin the path of meditation.

hooray for the path

The legacy of dharma teachings is: a path has been found that leads us out of samsara.

This path is what teachers uphold so that people like us can find it too. They train to a very high standard of meditative expertise and knowledge of the dharma so that the next generation (us) has access to the path. People dedicate lifetimes to ensuring that they can support others in this journey. And they’ve been doing it in every single generation for nearly 3000 years.

We don’t need to waste time “reinventing” a path, or “finding our own path.” There is no “your own path.” That is just the trickery of samsara luring you back into another sorrowful round.

Trying to customize a path to suit our preferences is recklessness. We have nothing to add to the path, we are not in a position to improve it — rather it is in a position to improve us. That can be a turnoff to some, but the desire to leave our mark on everything is part of the cycle of suffering. The path doesn’t accommodate anyone’s graffiti.

This path is outlined and made clear through the teachings of dharma. Dharma is like a guidebook through a densely overgrown forest. The guidebook has two functions.

1. It informs you that a path exists to guide you safely through this forest.

2. It gives you everything you need to find it, day after day, moment after moment until you are in the clear.

This guidebook (dharma) is so clear and responsive that after a year or so upon it you know with confidence that you are no longer walking back into fear and confusion, but out of it. The dharma is a terrific guidebook. The first years of practice often involve surprise, even awe, at just how clear and coherent the dharma is. How did we not know of this before?

the guidebook for future heroes

The dharma tells you what to look for at various stages of your journey, to confirm that you are on your way to freedom. It also tells you what to look for as signs that you’ve become lost again. In general, it teaches you the skill of knowing what to align yourself with, and what to distance yourself from, what to do and what to avoid, what to trust and what not to trust. In Tibetan this is called langdor and means what to accept and what to reject.

This is a similar skill to what any expert in any field has: they know better than the amateurs around them where the opportunities are sure to be, and where the hidden pitfalls are likely to be.

The dharma has always been considered the crowning knowledge of a lifetime. At the beginning of our journey we have very small ideas of what is possible in our life. But as we grow through meditation, our vision expands, and we come to see far beyond what we could have seen at the outset. We look back and realize we were thinking like pets, not like people. Pets just lay on carpets and mosey to their bowl. That’s all they want, and that’s all they get.

Dharma expands our outlook of what is possible for ourselves dramatically. We outgrow everything we ever thought, and our heart beats like a big bass drum rather than like chopsticks against a tin pan. The dharma opens our eyes to the existence of the path, and then the path stabilizes us stage by stage as we grow beyond our small worldview of fear and confusion.

freedom comes from a path of dharma practice

Nobody attains freedom without both the path and the collected knowledge that guides the path, which we have identified as dharma. Without these two, we would just be imitating real meditators. One of the great masters of the 12th century, Sakya Pandita, said that those who meditate without dharma are simply breathing like pigs on a meditation cushion. They achieve nothing whatsoever in their minutes or hours of doing so, but are tempted to imagine that they have.

Another great meditation master, Jamgon Kongtrul said that those who study dharma without meditating are like misers unwilling to use their wealth to benefit themselves or anyone else. They live like paupers on a mountain of wealth, not even taking care of their own health.

The true legacy is to practice meditation with good instructions along a path supported by a living tradition. This is typically referred to simply as dharma practice.

knowledge means no longer having to pretend

Meditators on a path of knowledge avoid the delusion and arrogance of having to make up “spiritual experiences” or any other falsifications that appease them.

On a path imbued with genuine knowledge, you’ll never pretend again. You’ll be an authentic person on an authentic path heading toward a full evolution of authentic wisdom.

And when we reflect on the incredible consistency of practice through the centuries, and the variety of excellent practice opportunities all over the world right now, why would we waste time with a pathless effort? Why spin our wheels in samsara and pretend that the next shiny thing will make it all better?

Samsara is called an ocean of suffering. Wherever you paddle, through whatever storm you face, you only end up in another world of suffering. The path of dharma and the practice of meditation takes you out of this ocean.

Oh, the tears, the tears of this pointless, unnecessary suffering. Much better to practice dharma.

where to look, what to do

You just don’t need to keep that stupid cycle of suffering alive. You can end it. Many have.

If you want a classical, traditional training, you can investigate any meditation group representing the traditions of Theravada, Zen, or Vajrayana dharma traditions. These all maintain the fullness of a legitimate path.

I have trained a little in all of these, but primarily in the last, the Vajrayana, specifically in the meditation paths of Mahamudra and Dzogchen (awareness based teachings with deep history). I know of a dozen communities all over the world that are flourishing, welcoming, and reliable. You don’t need to wonder if this stuff is alive and well. It is.

🔥 If you want to begin but don’t see yourself connecting with a buddhist tradition either now or ever, take a look at Finding Ground Meditation. It’s the collected training of the classical systems, put into a structure, a path, that makes sense for people living in the world of the 21st century.

Start with Finding Ground, and you’ll have everything you need to move forward.

we’re almost to the end!

So now we’ve covered the four important inner components: meditation, mind, mindfulness, and awareness. These are the aspects of the journey that we engage directly, day after day. They are personal activities, inner things.

Today we introduced a bigger perspective, the path, which includes the body of wisdom that makes it potent, the dharma.

The path of meditation is the visible footprint of dharma right in the middle of the confusion of the world.

The journey is built from the very stuff of our everyday life. It doesn’t involve becoming someone else or acting/dressing/speaking differently. It begins right here, right now, before we even do the dishes or vacuum the stairs. The path threads through all of our day-to-day experiences, our journey is strung together carefully over the course of our lifetime.

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One more in this series.

Next time, we will honor and acknowledge the world that has made this possible for people like us for generation after generation. Teachers.

These are the women and men trained to uphold the powerful teachings and practices for the sole purpose of keeping them available for people like you and me. Every student has a teacher. And every teacher was once a student.

All my teachers spent a great deal of time learning with their teachers. Then they spent more time sharing with students like me what their teachers taught, did or said that made an impact. So the impactful teachings were shared, but the simple act of sharing made an additional impact. That is the power of a lineage: you get the goods, and you get the goods from good people.

We are students. We are one half of the experience. The other half are the teachers of the path. (We’ll visit that in another post.)

See you then,

Jeffrey

This article is part of the Meditation 101: Six Ideas to Clarify Your Practice

You can read the rest of the series by following these links:

• Meditation is a fragile word. Use carefully.

• Mindfulness: it's been a rough 30 years.

• Mind is a little word for a big thing.

• Awareness: it's not what you know, it's how you know.

• Everybody needs a teacher, because we don't have enough time to do it alone.

I closed my previous article with these words:

We are students. We are one half of the experience. The other half is the teachers of the path.

This is important, because meditation is not only about your individual journey. It is about the very sacred, very profound, seemingly impossible existence of a path that supports your evolution, transforming you within the years of your single lifetime. The path is given to you by the previous generation1. That generation is represented by whoever teaches you the path you practice.

By valuing the teachers in your life, rather than valuing your own self-sufficiency (which won’t work very well) a neat thing happens: you build a small community into your life. You, your teacher(s), and the other students and teachers associated.

And if you are lucky, you may be able to connect to the teachers of your own teacher. Is there is an elegant term for that? “Grand-teacher” could work for now. It’s a person who your teacher trains with. Sometimes all three of you can be in the same room, and it’s awesome.

Many times I have taken a dozen of my own students with me to study with my teachers. That way they get to see who I learn from, how they teach, and understand how I reshape or interpret these teachings. Of course it could result in them leaving me for my own teachers, but that has happened only once or twice, and I’m happy for them.

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Three generations, always

In every generation that enters the journey of dharma and meditation, three generations need to be present. Here are two ways that breaks down for most of us.

1. There is our teacher.

2. There is the person who taught them.

3. There is us.

I emphasize this first because there are so many people who never learned from a teacher presenting themselves as teachers. That may work in some things, but it does not work in meditation. Unless you like fake meditation, then go to town.

In the bigger picture, which puts us in the middle of a three-generation context, it looks like this:

1. First, it takes the person who was there before us, our teacher (we may have more than one). This would include all the teachers who came before them. This is usually called a lineage. They are the previous generation(s).

2. Second, it takes ourselves and our peers, those who will newly benefit from all that has been maintained for us and offered to us. We are the current generation. Notice the inclusion of peers here. It won’t work very well if it is just ourselves and a teacher. You really need peers to make this fit into your life. That deserves it’s own post, but that’s for later.

3. Third, it takes those who will benefit from all our efforts to deepen and grow. These are our students, the next generation. Most people don’t actually train to become teachers, but even if they don’t they can be powerful forces in the lives of the next generation of students. Even if they are just “older friends” this can be a life changer. For me, some of the most important people in my life are older-generation practitioners who didn’t become teachers. But they are examples, models, inspirations.

We help the next generation in many ways: as teachers who present the dharma teachings and practice, as family members or neighbors who introduce new practitioners to others like them or to those who can mentor them, and as colleagues, co-journeyers who share the ups and downs of the path. And we can all at least become models of meditative development.

The fresh face of the older generation

Meditation leads to transformations that nothing else leads to. Someone transformed by something else, like psychotherapy or climbing Denali or selling their company and getting into fitness is not transformed by meditation. If you want to see what meditation does, you have to look at long time meditators who have done it right.

That makes elder practitioners unlike their elder peers who aren’t practitioners. Elder meditators are not the same thing as elder artists, elder social activists, or elder community builders. All elders are valuable, and all are needed. But…

Elder dharma practitioners are very special types of human elders, because they have cultivated meditative wisdom. No one else has done this, it’s their raison d’être.

What we have available to us today has passed through the caring hands of 2500 years — about 100 generations. The path, along with its teachers, has been serving its function for thousands of years, providing instructions, knowledge, and encouragement.

Elders = generosity. This sets a good example.

Meditation traditions have evolved over the centuries. Some things have changed, but some haven’t. We’ll all hear over and over again that the fundamental understanding of meditation was set in place 2500 years and hasn’t shifted, because it was so well done all the way back then. That is true.

But one more thing has remained unchanged, and has always been part of learning the path: the welcoming faces from the older generation ready to give you the inheritance of methods and knowledge. They have always been there, kindly, taking you in.

Without them you’d have nothing but your ideas.

They are prepared to hand over everything they learned from their teachers. Everything their teachers learned from their own teachers and so on, long before the internet, long before electricity, long before the printing press. The tradition of meditation is said to be open handed, which means nothing is kept from you. It isn’t a closed-handed system, which would mean that teachers won’t share the juiciest stuff, just the pedestrian stuff. Some asian traditions suffer from the “closed hand of the teacher”. But meditation isn’t one of them.

Some things have benefitted from continual advances in technology, but lots of things really haven’t needed it: loving, singing, dancing, writing, guitar playing. All things I love to do, btw.

Dharma2 has not needed technology. It hasn’t even needed science, which says something about how deep dharma is. Generally, science has a lot to offer, but not everything benefits directly from science. Dharma is pre-scientific, and it will always have a respected place in the human legacy as something lasting and irreplaceable that began long before the modern age.

We discovered a path to profound awakening early in our recorded history. We didn’t have to wait for science. That’s pretty cool.

Looking into the faces of the teachers in our world, we see those who carry one of the wonders of the world. Don’t you feel lucky to have at least some things that don’t bend before the altar of progress and industry?

Overcoming stupid self-sufficiency

We live in a strange time where people assume they can and should do everything by themselves. We may feel disgruntled by expertise. Life is so complicated that we have to submit to a hundred people a year for our needs to be met and our life to work: health, finances, taxes, news, auto repair, plumbing. And usually, we have to pay them. So much of our experience of community has been touched by commerce.

And yet it isn’t our imagination: 21st century life requires specialists for parts of our everyday world to function. We may not always need to take our car to the shop or pay for a repair to our dishwasher. We might take satifaction in doing it with the help of a Youtube video.

But none of us would attempt to fill our own cavities or let a friend perform hip replacement surgery on us. We need our experts.

We recognize expertise in the extremes, but are quick to assume that most things are within our reach unaided.

Some things seem the fair domain of expertise, and we are familiar enough with them to know what we won’t be able to do ourselves. But when we don’t have familiarity with something, seems like half of us assume we need an expert and half assume they can do it all by themselves.

Where does meditation fall on that line:

Meditation is within our reach at the very, very beginning. We can learn to sit in the posture and tune into our breath.

But soon we move past our familiar world, and find ourselves in states of mind that are unusual, maybe confusing, and that is when we can make rapid, deep development, or where we can spiral into deeper, subtler layers of confusion. Meditation is only DIY up to that point.

At the point meditation takes us out of our normal operating environment, we’ll become anxious. We’ll look for familiar signs, landmarks, something to help us navigate to safety. But what is safety?

Our habits know very well that safety means go back to just exactly the way we’ve always been. And every internal voice will guide us back to familiar territory. But it won’t be guiding us into wisdom, it will simply reroute us back to our habitual mindset. The only voice that takes us out of confusion is the voice of wisdom, and we have not learned that voice yet. That’s where a teacher comes in.

Intuition is not wisdom

We might be very intuitive people, and navigate our life skillfully by relying on our intuition, our “gut instinct.”

But intuition is not wisdom. Intuition is not the same thing as dharma. Intuition is a survival intelligence rooted in our body and mind. It is not rooted in our awareness. Yes, it will help us navigate within samsara and avoid dangers, but it will not lead us out of samsara.

We will not escape fear and confusion following our intuition. Even with good intuition, we need a teacher.

the voice of wisdom

Dharma is what the voice of wisdom shares. Dharma is the body of knowledge that illuminates the way out of confusion and fear. But dharma is a body of knowledge without a mouth, so it doesn’t speak.

Dharma is given a voice through a person who speaks the language of dharma: the dharma teacher. There are lots of teachers of the dharma, and we are lucky in this way. But we only need one to begin.

You might think, I’ll start on my own and find a teacher later on. This can work, but it’s important to follow through with finding a teacher, if we push it off we can end up down a sidetrack without knowing it.

It is best to join with a teacher and fellow students from the very outset of meditation practice. The biggest enemy of genuine development in the meditation path is our own lack of maturity, and our stubbornness in trying to guide ourselves. That’s why we need a teacher’s perspective. We also need their patience, clarity, skill, and experience.

Spending time with a teacher usually means spending time with someone whose nervous system has been conditioned by 20,000 or 50,000 hours of correct practice. They aren’t just good at meditation, they have built it into their body and mind. They are meditation practice. You’ll pick up on that vibe.

Seeking a teacher who knows the path is the best way to begin. Doing so, we follow in the footsteps of every single generation before us. It worked for them, so it will work for us too.

Communities of practice

One of the greatest joys in the meditation path is connecting with a community of teachers and students. Some communities are vast, with dozens or hundreds of teachers circulating within them. Some communities are small, and form around one teacher. If we don’t have an accessible community nearby, we may have to travel to engage with one, which is quite common. Online communities are also available, they are a new thing to the world of meditation, but they work well.

If travel is out of the question, you can find communities online. Our community, Finding Ground Meditation, is an online community.

The path of meditation lasts our entire lifetime. Communities of meditators stay in touch across generations, so there are always elders and new people in your life.

When I train yearly with my teachers, I feel the continuity of a dozen generations and more. It stabilizes me. I look around at my fellow students, and we exchange the same glance, the one that says what a relief that such a wise community exists.

My teachers were all part of a system, so they taught and guided practitioners along the same path. Now, there is a global network of students from these teachers who stay connected. It works well and fosters community, because people who share a set of instructions also share the experiences of the path. This continuity makes the new generations of students much better supported. Continuity means there is a modern “history” and a modern culture for new practitioners to learn within.

Consistentcy makes things simpler

Continuity like this is really important for human health. Until the 20th century, this was something you could take for granted in meditation communities. It would be unlikely to encounter teachers of vastly different outlook without traveling to other parts of the world (and those who did were probably ready to expand their outlook). Most people could settle into a practice style and learn a set of dharma teachings that wouldn’t become mixed with other things, and live their entire lives in this single way of practice and learning.

There was nothing wrong with that, it worked for 2500 years.

But things are different now. Everything is available all at once, and in our bewilderment at the options, we fail to appreciate the important distinctions between things that really are what they seem, and things that only seem to be, but aren’t.

Some things really are dharma, and some things are very much not dharma. But anyone can call what they teach whatever they want, so we must be cautious.

In particular, in 2024, people don’t seem to recognize that not all “teachers of meditation” are teaching the same thing — or even similar things. Meditation is unregulated, and the only place you will find standards of practice are in the well established traditions that have a reputation and a generational heritage to uphold.

Training with multiple teachers

If you train under more than one teacher, just make sure they are from similar systems and have similar training. Mixing systems is a pathless journey. Every year I work with students who have spent 20 or 30 years hopping around, taking a little bit from various teachers and approaches. Sometimes they feel inspired, and at other times they feel lost. Eventually they all come to the conclusion that they should have chosen one approach and committed to it.

my advice from the heart

So my genuine advice: look carefully at anyone who teaches meditation. Make sure they have the training a teacher should have:

• They should have done thousands and thousands of hours of meditation, and spent years under the guidance and oversight of teachers.

• They should have a healthy relationship with other teachers.

• Make sure they are joyful, and that they love people. Meditation brings joy forward, and fills people with love. Fake meditation builds competitiveness and desperation.

• Students under a teacher should develop into clear headed, gentle people. If the older students seem petty, or far out and super spiritual — but not coherent, get the hell out of there.

• If the teacher has problems with money, problems with intoxicants, or cultivates sexual relationships with their students as a general norm, get the hell out of there.

If any of these are out of place, you will be the one that pays the price.

examine your teachers, don’t settle

There are two things to watch out for in selecting a teacher: untrained or insufficiently trained.

1. untrained

Real teachers are parts of meditation communities, they aren’t isolated “gurus” who have no colleagues. If you can’t easily determine who a self-professed “teacher” trained under — if they seem vague or irritated at the question, that is all you need to see. Move on, you are dealing with someone who is not trained. Avoid.

2. insufficiently trained

This next thing must be said in the age of the internet: qualified teachers aren’t young. Qualified teachers spent their youth in training. When they are ready to step into the role of teaching, they aren’t young any more. Usually, they will be in their 40s.

Really.

Young traditional teachers (Tibetans used as an example)

Even in the Tibetan system, where people are selected to become teachers while still in their teens, very few complete the full training before they are 30. And even if someone is an excellent teacher at 30, they are still only 30, and they are probably sheltered from the problems most of us face in our everyday lives.

A well-trained 30 year old teacher will have spent 20 years of their life in constant supervision by elders: studying, going into retreat, and doing absolutely nothing that resembles your life. They are very often raised in monastic settings and deal with monastic situations, not in urban settings dealing with urban situations. They know nothing of life at that point.

The best ones will admit it. They usually tag along behind older teachers and gradually learn the role and responsibility of being a full teacher. It’s a big job, a big role, and has the capacity to harm every bit as much as it helps. It takes mentoring and time.

Stick with teachers who are visibly adults.

One of my teachers, a prodigy who was legitimately teaching in his 20s, told us that he is nothing more than a “dharma princess,”3 a privileged monk who has lived under the care of others his whole life and really shouldn’t be talking about anything other than meditation. We all laughed, but we knew he was telling the truth. In my tradition it is generally thought that the ideal age for a teacher is around 60.

I have four living teachers: one is 48, another 57, another 73, and the oldest among them 90. Another teacher passed away last year at 90. [Edit: both older teachers are now dead: Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso and Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche.]

Real teachers are unmistakeable. The best way to begin is by starting with a real teacher!

I’m not a great example of this rule of thumb. I was trained and “empowered” to teach in my early 30s, and given further authorizations regularly up into my 40s, up to the point where I was training and authorizing new teachers.

I think this was only because there was such a high demand for teachers who spoke English, and who understood the life of the West. From my earliest days as a teacher, my students were usually over 40 years old.

Sometimes I wince to think of what I must have been like as a 32-year old meditation teacher, but I must have been ok, because I avoided scandal and maintained relationships with students from all the way back. Still, I appreciate the training I got that kept me out of trouble. Now I am just about old enough to be a real teacher!

Series concluded.

Over this series we’ve been on a walk through the important concepts of meditation that every meditator should know from day one.

This article is part of the Meditation 101: Six Ideas to Clarify Your Practice

You can read the rest of the series by following these links:

• Meditation is a fragile word. Use carefully.

• Mindfulness: it's been a rough 30 years.

• Mind is a little word for a big thing.

• Awareness: it's not what you know, it's how you know.

• A path makes things make sense.

To recap:

• Meditation is the practice of working with mind to free ourselves from fear and confusion.

• Mind is that which knows something other than itself (a thought, a visual object, etc.)

• Mindfulness is a complex term that refers to the mind’s capacity to direct and sustain attention and avoid distraction.

• Awareness is the pure knowing quality of consciousness. It can both know objects (via the mind and body, which it can see into) and it can know itself all on its own.

• Path: The journey of meditation is progressive and sequential, and the process of unfolding takes place along a well-mapped path. The path and all the training within it is contained in the collected teachings known as the dharma.

• Teacher: The journey of meditation begins when a person encounters the dharma through meeting a teacher. The teacher’s job is to pass along the dharma teachings, and to help a student along the path. Teachers are alwayspart of a larger system (a lineage), and it is the lineage that secures the resources of dharma and teachers for students. When a teacher dies, the lineage fills the gap with another teacher trained to the same standard.

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Jeffrey

You can relax because it’s finally time to explore the topic of awareness, and awareness goes hand-in-hand with relaxation. It isn’t until you get to relaxation within awareness that the results of meditation are truly “transformative”.

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Mindfulness on its own doesn’t reach as far: it enables many changes, but those same changes revert if we don’t keep our mindfulness strong. It’s like physical exercise, we have to keep it up or lose our gains. There is probably an important factor of neurological conditioning taking place within mindfulness practice that loses footing if it isn’t continuously maintained1.

Awareness is different, changes in it are more durable, and ultimately they don’t rely on our biology2. A traditional analogy is often used: in a dream, mindfulness changes the experience of a dream, but the dream continues. Awareness brings one out of the dream. Awareness is the main factor in waking up from the dream.

Awareness goes hand in hand with relaxation and insight. Usually relaxation comes first, and this triggers insight, which reveals awareness. But sometimes insight comes early, and makes relaxation much easier, which makes awareness accessible. They work together, and there is more than one way of approaching the process.

When awareness is activated through meditation, it expands. And many, many people report that it gets brighter and stronger with age, reducing or eliminating fear and anxiety, making life all the better.

This article is part of the Meditation 101: Six Ideas to Clarify Your Practice

• Meditation is a fragile word. Use carefully.

• Mindfulness: it's been a rough 30 years.

• Mind is a little word for a big thing.

• A path makes things make sense.

• Everybody needs a teacher, because we don't have enough time to do it alone.

Meditative relaxation does the heavy lifting

Relaxation is the key to awareness. A busy mind, a racing mind, races in the opposite direction to awareness. Relaxation, on the other hand, is a pathway into awareness.

But what kind of relaxation?

Ordinary everyday relaxation won’t get us there. Ordinary relaxation, as wonderful as it is, doesn’t foster awareness.

Ordinary relaxation is what we could call physical relaxation, sometimes with a touch of letting our mind drift pleasantly. Relaxing our mind in this way has more to do with dropping our guard, or letting our discipline take a break. Rather than leading to the discovery of awareness, this reflects a disengagement of mindfulness.

It’s kind of funny if you think about it: not only does ordinary relaxation not deepen our meditation, but it also can weaken the mindfulness we worked so hard to develop.

Now I don’t mean any disrespect to ordinary relaxation. It is wonderful to relax when we need to, and a mind that maintains mindfulness can enjoy as much ordinary relaxation as it wants without problems.

But when relaxation encourages a drift into wandering mind, it is counterproductive to meditation. Why? Two reasons.

1. Wandering mind dismantles mindfulness, like being bedridden causes muscles and bones to atrophy.

2. Wandering mind does not lead to awareness.

Meditative relaxation is a new skill, not an old habit

Once we have invested time in developing mindfulness through meditation, we want to hold onto our gains. Mindfulness is power, but that power can only show itself when we use it for what it is best at doing: directing us away from distraction.

When the mind has been tamed and distraction diminishes, an opportunity opens up that is leveraged by some, but not all meditation traditions. The ones that leverage it are the awareness traditions, such as Zen, Mahamudra, and Dzogchen. They are powerful, but rely on our capacity to relax without falling into distraction and wandering mind.

Actually, we all have the capacity, if we develop it. So what we really need is to realize this capacity, turn it into ability.

This means we need to learn a new approach, a way of relaxing that lifts us away from the turmoil of the mind altogether.

That approach is meditative relaxation. Sometimes this is called “effortless mindfulness” or more traditionally “mahamudra shamatha” or even “objectless shamatha.” Whatever they are called, they develop a type of relaxation which is eye-opening and new.

Meditative relaxation disentangles us from thought activity without pushing thoughts away, controlling them, or doing anything aggressive — or even assertive.

It is like waking up from a dream, not like climbing out of quicksand. It is a skill, and once learned, it makes meditation potent.

Usually meditative relaxation is built on a foundation of mindfulness. It is possible to begin it before training mindfulness, but it can remain elusive for far longer without the stability of mindfulness backing us.

If you learn the elements of mindfulness first, awareness becomes a natural next step — and what a big, bold step that proves to be.

Meditative relaxation is the major point of awareness-based traditions, such as the ones just mentioned (Mahamudra, Zen, and Dzogchen meditation systems). It is the core initial training within our Finding Ground Meditation approach.

Awareness vs awareness vs awareness

In meditation traditions we talk about three types of awareness.

1. everyday awareness (sometimes this is called “domestic” or “ordinary” awareness)

2. meditative awareness (often called “mindful-awareness”)

3. awakened awareness (also known as “empty awareness”). We’ll talk about this last one another time, because it’s a big topic. We have enough on our plate already.

Everyday awareness

For meditation to be truly transformative, it has to aim itself toward the realm of awareness, which means navigating the layers of thinking and confusion. To make this possible, we begin by developing mind and mindfulness through the initial stages of meditation. These involve a double handful of everyday awareness: the part of us that knows what we’re doing at any given point.

This is similar to the way mindfulness based traditions think of mindfulness itself. Awareness traditions emphasize the knowing quality of mindfulness right from the beginning. In Tibetan, the two terms are often joined together as “mindful awareness” or trenshe.

The more everyday awareness we have, the simpler our state of mind becomes. And by simpler, we also mean cleaner and clearer. A simple mind is uncluttered, and awareness takes over much of the work that was previously shouldered by the clutter of thinking mind.

Meditative awareness

Training this way opens a pathway through the traffic of mind and distraction, and this takes us through to a clearing beyond mind altogether: this is where we discover meditative awareness.

Meditative awareness is a platform of experience within ourselves where we can view the workings of our mind without being pulled into it. Awareness itself does not create a dialogue within itself like mind does. It is like a clear sky, pervaded by light.

And it is a very quiet experience. When you are within awareness, the mind subsides.

The mind cannot see or detect awareness, so it may begin to react as if it has lost its identity. While abiding in awareness, the mind will have less ability to keep its tangents of distraction together. It’s stories will end quickly after they have begun. At times, this will almost incite a revolution, with the mind searching for where the sense of self has gone. This is the mind trying to put itself back together, to make everything continuous again, the way it imagines they always were (even though they weren’t).

Because of this, you may feel that the mind has increased its turmoil, and you can lose your footing within awareness and fall back into mind. This happens because you are lured back into the stories of the mind. On its own the mind can’t reach into awareness to find you — you are beyond its reach. But habits of always returning to the stormy ocean of mind kicks in, and this continually interrupts your early attempts to stay in awareness.

If you keep going, you’ll develop the strength of meditative relaxation and naturally ride the waves without falling in. It’s a great feeling, too. Within awareness you feel safe and sound. It’s like being invisible in a crowd, seeing everything but not being seen.

Awareness is an early milestone

When you begin to experience meditative awareness, you realize, once and for all, that the meditative journey is real.

Up until that point, this might seem like philosophy, or theory. You may be intrigued, but not yet convinced: maybe the hype around meditation is valid, but maybe not. You just don’t know yet.

That doubt persists until your meditation matures. When you experience meditative awareness our perspective changes, sometimes in a single session. But at least, after a few good sessions of meditative awareness you find yourself excited about the possibilities, and usually makes you appreciate the teachers and traditions you learned all this from. We all do an about-face when we glimpse awareness!

Awareness, simplified

All this talk of awareness vs mind vs mindfulness gets muddled quickly if you haven’t already seen these qualities come alive through meditation practice.

In a nutshell:

1. Mind is that part of you that engages through directed attention with one thing at a time. It uses thinking (also called conceptuality) to isolate an object or task and analyze it.

2. Mindfulness stabilizes the environment of the mind so that this analysis and directed attention proceeds without disruption.

3. Awareness is the general knowingness of our experience. It is not conceptual, it has no relationship to thinking. It is both aware of the mind (and body) but also aware of itself.

Awareness is the part of you that knows whether there is something to know (such as an object: a cat, a hat, a bat) or nothing to know. In other words, awareness can know something, but it continues to know even if there is nothing other than itself to know.

And that is where the possibilities open up: awareness can know itself. This profound statement is the backbone of awareness meditation traditions.

This capacity is where the third type of awareness begins: awakened awareness.

Awakened awareness

Awakened awareness is the natural unfolding of the self-knowing capacity. When this lamp turns on, transformation is unstoppable, and it is getting to this experience that takes up the bulk of our early training.

The capacity for awareness to know itself in isolation is known in Tibetan as rangrik, or “self-knowingness”. Some translators render this as “reflexive awareness” or “self-cognizance”. It is way beyond our everyday notion of “self-awareness,” which means one has a general sense of who they are and their role in the world. This common self-awareness is a much shallower quality, albeit an important one.

Self-knowing awareness is a deeper, more intimate experience than the already inspiring experience of meditative awareness. And intimate is a very good word for this. The experience of awakened awareness, self-knowing awareness, is probably the most intimate experience a person can have of anything in their precious life. It is the most life-affirming experience of them all. It touches something within us, and we see that that innermost part of us is good, very good.

The traditions call this intimate realm of our awareness buddha nature, our innate capacity for immeasurable wisdom and freedom.

awareness vs mind

We now have mind, mindfulness, and awareness. They aren’t the same, but of course they are tightly related. We finally sort them out by practicing meditation, but we have to learn them as ideas first.

Mindfulness is a faculty of the mind. If the mind were a hand, mindfulness would be a finger. Other faculties would be other fingers: attention, intention, love, anger, equanimity. They are listed and described in the traditional literature of buddhist meditation.

Awareness is not a faculty of mind. It is pre-mind, which means that the mind happens against the backdrop of awareness. If mind were a hand, awareness would be the space around the hand, the environment that makes a hand possible.

Mindfulness and attention

Mindfulness is closely related to the faculty of attention. It is a hands-on faculty of the mind. We direct attention. We pay attention to something specific, such as our breath, or the keys of a piano.

Attention is like a flashlight beam that is pointed specifically at an object. Mindfulness is the scaffolding that helps and holds the beam of attention so we can examine and understand what we are illuminating.

awareness is very different from mind, mindfulness, and attention

Awareness isn’t something we direct like a flashlight, it’s more like a bare light bulb illuminating everything around it. Think field of awareness rather than beam of awareness. All three types of awareness are like this, they are just increasingly potent and free from entanglement with the mind.

Unlike attention and mindfulness, which are faculties of our basic being, awareness is more subtle and pervasive.

If you stand outside your body and all its sensations, and your inner reaction to being outside, are all easy to locate as parts of you.

But the space around your body, and the vast space around the earth itself are part of the experience even if we don’t identify them as part of us. But they are: without the space around us, nothing else would be possible, the space is a fundamental necessity for anything else. That space is also, of course, pervading our bodies, even though we think of our bodies as existing within space. That is not just academic thinking either, it is true, and it really shows up in meditation.

Awareness is like that space within and all around us. It isn’t just “in” us, and it isn’t just “outside” us. It is the part of us that knows the fact of our existence, and yet can also know the contents of our experience. In the same way some people believe in a god that is everywhere and all knowing, you could make a case for awareness being that way.

You are reading with body and mind, knowing with awareness

As you read this, your mind interprets the written characters brought in through your eyeballs. Your mind also contemplates and tries to make sense of the meaning the words bring. Mindfulness sustains attention on reading so that you can get through the paragraph or the entire piece before being pulled away by something else. Mindfulness also connects the meaning of this paragraph with the other paragraphs above.

Eyeballs do the finding, the hunting, for stuff to process. Mind and mindfulness are the active processing components of reading.

Awareness sees all of this happening. It sees the activity of physical reading, the attempt to understand, the effort to stay mindful, and it witnesses the drawing of conclusions. But through all this it has not done a thing, or burned a single calorie. It is free from work or effort or doing. Awareness knows, which doesn’t take effort or energy.

All this stuff appearing in our lives are like reflections in a mirror. Awareness is the mirror itself. Awareness sees the reflections, but the reflections don’t see awareness. On top of that, awareness is aware of itself. The reflections in the mirror, the body and mind and all their operations, are not aware of themselves. They are known through awareness knowing them.

Reading, in our example, is a local activity of knowing plugged into the source itself: awareness. Without awareness there would be no reading. But without reading, there would still be awareness.

Awareness: see for yourself

This is why awareness is considered the reality underneath everything else. The mind, the body, all the components we’ve talked about, only seem to be alive and independent. They are all known by awareness, not by themselves. And when we are healthy, through meditation, awareness sees without fixating or clinging to the parts of the display. Awareness is free of clinging, free of the display itself. Awareness is the unchanging basis of their very existence.

And the important point of all this is that awareness can be the basis of meditation. That takes it from a philosophical idea (“awareness is the reality underneath everything”) into a direct personal experience that confirms itself. When you practice meditation according to awareness traditions, you enter into this experience yourself, and whatever you thought about it beforehand no longer matters. You see for yourself.

In the mahamudra tradition, awareness is understood to be a mixture of space and mind, and analogies to this effect pop up throughout the centuries of it’s texts.

Mahamudra instructions teach you to rest in the space of awareness, free from mind.

The first step in doing so is to learn to relax — relax in a meditative way, so that the contractions and seizures of thinking are able to unwind, and your sense of being, of knowing, can expand into its natural spaciousness.

Awareness is already there, ready for everything

We don’t develop awareness the way we develop mindfulness or attention. We uncover it.

Awareness is there whether we recognize it or not. Awareness pervades all experiences of any kind. It is the light by which we know things — it is even present when we dream.

In classical texts, awareness is likened to the light of the sun pervading space, illuminating everything without bias. Awareness doesn’t judge or evaluate, it just shines, and this “shining” is the equivalent to knowing.

An important traditional term for awareness relates to light: luminosity. Sometimes this is translated as clear light, or luminous clarity. As you can see, light keeps popping up, and this has to do with the role light plays in our experience of seeing things. It is a good analogy for that, but not really a direct description.

You can experience luminosity with the lights out.

Awareness is the luminosity of experience, the capacity to know and understand. Some books substitute the word luminosity for awareness, so it is worth knowing this is what they mean. Luminosity can have deeper, richer connotations, but they are all related to the fundamental quality of awareness.

Just to be clear: luminosity does not mean a cool experience of lights, or rays of lights coming out of your eyes, or having exciting visions. Luminosity is not trippy, it is profound. It’s not about colors and energy, it’s about the nature of reality and the role awareness has in that nature.

In classical texts, luminosity does not refer to domestic awareness or meditative awareness, it refers to awakened awareness. When the world luminosity (Tibetan; ösel) shows up, you are dealing with deep dharma.

As we have seen, mind is the part of us that knows something else, and it depends on the light of awareness to be able to know. Mind plugs itself into the knowing capacity of awareness, and then uses that borrowed ability to know things in particular.

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next up: the bigger context of our journey

This has probably been a lot to read. Students are always amazed at how deep these simple terms are. There is no shame in giving it another read, or checking other articles that go into this same topic. But if you do, just remember that this has been a presentation from the awareness-based traditions of buddhist meditation, such as mahamudra, dzogchen, zen, and buddha nature traditions. Other traditions may talk about awareness in a slightly different way.

There are more books and articles on this than you could fit into a lifetime of reading, so don’t try to tackle them all!

So far we’ve looked at meditation, mindfulness, mind, and awareness. There are two more topics in this series: path, and the role of a teacher. Next up will be the overall journey of meditation from just starting out to the deepest tranformative outcome. This is called the path.

Jeffrey

This article is part of the Meditation 101: Six Ideas to Clarify Your Practice

You can read the rest of the series by following these links:

• Meditation is a fragile word. Use carefully.

• Mindfulness: it's been a rough 30 years.

• Mind is a little word for a big thing.

• A path makes things make sense.

• Everybody needs a teacher, because we don't have enough time to do it alone.

If you’ve read the other posts in this series, you know my position that we have to be careful with our words, because the internet is full of variations for what everything means. I can’t get away from the term “meditation” because it is nearly universal. But when I use it, I use it in a specific way, as do my many teacher friends.

When we talk about meditation, we mean an inner practice of mind and awareness that releases us from fear and confusion.

Sometimes, this is phrased as “freedom from suffering” and I’m fine with that too, as long as we don’t get mired in the many, many things suffering can mean. Thus, fear and confusion is a better summary statement, according to my experience and training.

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Terms are special words

When we start our journey into meditation we really need to know what things mean. If we don’t know what things mean, we pretend to meditate and pretend to have transformed from it. Or we pretend we tried to meditate and also pretend it didn’t suit us. And it isn’t quick and easy to know what the big ideas in meditation, along with the words that communicate them mean. It is an education, and it stretches us: you, me, and everybody else.

We don’t already understand meditation, no matter who we are. We have to learn it, and most people just aren’t up to that task. They don’t want to learn, and they default into a lot of pretending in their lives. The word for that, pretentiousness, pretty well sums up much of what passes as meditation “instruction” on the internet: it’s just adult or young-adult level pretending to know and understand something that take more than whatever these pretenders have actually done.

Once you do understand meditation and its language, you can spot pretenders as soon as the open their mouths. But if you don’t understand meditation and its language, you can spend years and years listening to people who genuinely don’t know a thing about what they are talking about. And that is a massive loss. It would be like not knowing that asbestos is poisonous, and so letting your children play in it.

I am not saying you will die if you start listening to fakers. But the boys in the photograph above lost the last years of their lives, probably at least thirty of them, that would have been part of their lifespan. When someone doesn’t distinguish between real and imaginary meditation instructions, they lose time. Some people lose 20-30 years trying to make instructions “work” that never could have “worked” because they weren’t part of a genuine system.

In my life as a meditation teacher, every year I meet people who’ve been practicing meditation for a long time, sometimes longer than I have, but they haven’t been practicing actual meditation, just what some sham teacher in the 1970s or 1980s told them to do. When I give them the first steps of genuine instructions, they are surprised, then amazed. After a year, they wonder how they managed to miss the point so completely for so long. The answer: they didn’t take the pains to make sure they were starting on a true foundation.

Meditation isn’t something somebody made up in the 20th century. It isn’t something that someone “discovered” on their own. It’s a systematic art of cultivating particular qualities of the mind which took huge spans of time, probably a thousand or more years, just to get to it’s first historically important starting point in around 500 BCE.

There is a lot behind the practice, so of course, putting the work in during our first months and years makes sense. It’s what everyone else has done before us, so would we be different?

Putting things in place with terms

Meditation charts the vast space of mind carefully, thoroughly, and provides us with a map for us to make our jourey into it. Geographical maps use pictures, but meditation maps use language. Understanding the language of meditation is what helps us make a strong start, moving us in the right direction early.

Even the most obvious and simple words you see in every book or hear in every talk about mediation need care. They aren’t just words, they’re terms. Terms are words, but words with superpowers. Meditation has a whole language of superpowered words.

Let’s start with our first point: meditation. Referring back the definition I gave above:

Meditation is the inner practice of mind and awareness …

Let’s look at the two words at the end: mind and awareness. These are big words and there is a lot to say about each. Awareness will come in another post, here we’ll tuck into the word mind.

Mind is one of three components that make up a human being. Here are all three:

1. Body

2. Mind

3. Awareness

I know these are nothing new, but within meditation, you’ll find further layers of meaning in each one. And when these become part of your experience, you’ll be a changed person.

Meditators have a lot to share, but of course so do doctors, scientists, gym teachers, etc., and they all use these same terms.

But they use them differently. And in this series of articles, we are interested in what meditators have to say about these three. Doctors have their own platform, and so do scientists and gym teachers (don’t they?).

Meditators have had their own platform for centuries, but haven’t found their way into the modern world as quickly as necessary to retain their ownership of their own knowledge. That’s why there are so many fakers making it big on social media despite not knowing a thing about the topic itself.

Mind has a full time job: it is the knower of things

Mind is a major topic in meditation. I could get lost in an attempt to make it all clear, so let’s establish the basics, just what you need to know to take a next step.

What is mind?

Mind is that which knows other.

And that’s that.

But…. What does that mean?

It means that the part of our experience that recognizes the presence of another thing (a cup of coffee, a cat, a headache), and knows it as something else (something “other”), is called mind.

Mind doesn’t just “know,” it knows something other than itself. It knows the thing over there. It knows, or assumes, that thing is something else, something not it. When I see you, I assume you are not me. Mind does this. Mind also knows the things we see in dreams. It knows the daydream while the daydream is happening. It knows the cup of coffee on the table.

Mind is not awareness.

There’s another face to this single experience, the inward facing aspect that knows itself. Most people (though not everyone), also have a sense of “me” that is distinct enough from “other” that they can talk about it, describe it, and recognize it within their experience. This is the “sense of self” that becomes important later on in mediation, it becomes an object of meditation that really starts to turn our world inside out (in the best possible way).

The part of us that knows itself is called awareness. It is a different thing from mind.

Mind knows other, and awareness knows itself (or “ourself”), and the two taken together constitute our experience of the world.

This becomes a treasure trove in mediation

It sounds philosophical, but it’s a simple idea: mind is the part of us that knows the things in the world. Our hands don’t know the things of the world, and our liver doesn’t know the things of the world. It’s our mind that has this quality. And let’s be frank: on its own this hardly seems like anything we needed to know. It seems obvious.

But all that changes when you start experiencing things in meditation. The distinction between mind, the things it knows, and the awareness that knows itself becomes a huge, vibrating Eureka moment just coming over the horizon. That’s when, as my first teacher told me, “you’ll be racing through all your notebooks looking for this information again.” And he was right.

When you begin to have genuine meditative experience, all these ideas come to life and you are relieved to have them mapped out in advance. It’s like you find yourself lost in the woods, except that you remember that you have a map and a flashlight in your pocket!

Scenario: Your hands touch a cup of hot coffee and feel warmth.

Breakdown: Your hands feel (physical sensation) the warmth, but don’t know that warmth. The mind is what knowsthat warmth.

And who is knowing that experience? Not the mind: it is just knowing the warmth. The you that experiences that “knowing the warmth” is awareness. But until you can separate awareness from mind, mind will pollute the experience of awareness, such that you can’t easily differentiate them.

Parts of the mind

Where the topic of mind gets interesting is when we talk about the parts of the mind. Because oh yes, the mind, the part of us that knows, has another characteristic: it has faculties. Faculties are parts that perform unique functions. Anger is a faculty, and so is conscientiousness. And they are not the same, they perform functions that are unique to them.

Functions might seem like a funny term for anger, but anger does not produce the same results as patience, desire does not produce the same results as equanimity. The difference in the results shows how each of these performs a function. But it doesn’t mean that we need each of these or that their functions are good for us.

Anger never, ever produces love or well being or joy (according to the meditation tradition, that is), just like tomato seeds will never produce palm trees, lions, or anything other than tomato plants. The function of the tomato seed is to produce tomato plants.

What is the function of anger then? Anger has the function of separating us from peace and paving the way for negative conduct.

Similarly, the opposite of anger, absence of hatred, is a state of mind that does not have a hostile attitude toward a person or a feeling, and it has the function of not becoming involved in negative actions.

It is all mapped, already

Every substantial flavor of the mind, from anger and arrogance, to equanimity and conscientiousness, has been very carefully observed and understood, almost like (or exactly like) the periodic table of chemical elements. When you understand the various types of mental experiences that appear and influence your mind, you can become skillful and help the good ones flourish and the unhealthy ones weaken.

In the books, these are called “mental factors” which is a technical way of describing emotions or character traits, such as:

• self-respect

• diligence

• jealousy

• pride

Altogether there are fifty-one mental factors, and when you begin to see them in action, you become the pilot of your ship. Until that point, you are in a rudderless boat adrift a stormy sea.

There’s a lot of interesting stuff the meditation teachings have to say about our mind, our experiences, and how much power we actually have to reorganize ourselves and set off for an adventure that would be impossible otherwise.

And if you stick with it, it will all find its way to you without overwhelm. It’s an organic education made possible by the practice of meditation. Most of this is learned not just by reading, but by seeing. The seeing happens on the mediation seat.

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wrapping up: mind

Here’s our expanded summary, with the definitions of both meditation and mind combined:

Meditation, the practice of freeing ourselves from fear and confusion, involves working with the mind, the part of us that knows the things it comes into contact with.

And how does the meditator work with the mind to free themselves from fear and confusion? They do so by isolating the most important faculties and making them strong: mindfulness and awareness!

And that’s what we’ll talk about next time!

You’ve heard the phrase “coming to terms.” We spend a little extra time in the early minutes of a conversation to make sure we agree on what important words mean.

Meditators —new and old — have to do this. If we don’t the disagreements and assumptions get troublesome. Or comical. So we have to do it, and the more we do, the better we get at it.

And first things first, we have to wrestle the slippery term “meditation” into something consistent. Because everyone who uses it seems to think it means one thing — often their thing — but year by year it has weakened to a point where doesn’t really mean anything.

So, let’s consider what it is trying to mean. We’ll see that an old word has been given new meanings. Maybe too many of them

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“Meditation” is an attempted translation. That’s all.

We have to start with an agreement.

Do we agree that “meditation” is an English word? Do we agree that it usually points to something outside the realm of English-speaking culture?

Please say “yes.”

As one who lives and breathes in the world of meditation teachers and students, I’ll put out there that the common usage these days points to the inner practices of the mind developed simultaneously and cooperatively by Buddhist and Hindu traditions 3000 years ago, long before the English language existed. Not everyone knows the details, the “3000 years ago” part, or even the “Buddhist and Hindu traditions” part. But somehow, they get that anyway.

When people say meditation, and they don’t mean this, they often have to clarify that they mean something else. Because in common usage, meditation means that quiet thing people do on the floor, or maybe these days, on a chair.

So right away we know that meditation is a translation of some other culture’s word. And translations are usually a best attempt to convey meaning, not always exact — translation is an art, not a science.

Some words are almost impossible to translate into a single word. Often you need a string of words, or a paragraph, to convey what comfortably fits into a single word in the original language. Here are some examples:

saudade

The Portuguese word saudade means a longing or nostalgia for someone or something that is no longer there, and it also indicates an uncomfortable knowledge that the person or thing will not return. No single English word conveys the full meaning of saudade. This is sometimes translated as “nostalgia” but doing so leaves out the nuance of the original meaning.

And most English speakers don’t use or recognize the word saudade, and they also don’t carry the meaning of it, because only the word can allow them to do that.

hygge

The Danish word hygge is usually translated as coziness. But hygge means a lot more than coziness, it carries a sense of comfort, togetherness, and well-being that is a defining part of Scandinavian culture. It is not mere “coziness” because it includes an emotional state as well as a physical state, and beyond both of these, it carries a sense of finding joy in the simple, everyday things in life, enjoying good things with good people.

There is no English word for this, and nothing in English wraps this meaning into a culturally shared concept. English speakers don’t experience hygge, at least until they have the word in them.

The important point is that without the word, the meaning isn’t necessarily present. Sometimes it is, though: snow and the French neige mean more or less the same thing. English don’t need the word neige, because they have the word snow.

But as with saudade and hygge, other words are doorways out of our cultural vocabulary and into another.

The word meditation almost tries to prevent that door-opening from taking place.

Choosing the right word

Meditation as it is used in Buddhist and Hindu contexts has layers of meaning that no English word can mean. And not just that, the ideas contained in the original are ideas that don’t exist natively for English speakers unless they venture outside of English language ideas.

When we try to translate meditation we run into the obstacles and biases of the English language, things we don’t usually notice because we are so used to them.

Until the 1990s almost everything we heard about meditation was framed in Western religious frameworks. Meditation was compared to a type of prayer or communion with the divine practiced in the “religions” of India. (Sounds like Victorian thinking, makes me nauseous.)

In the 1990s, a second framework became popular: that of psychotherapy and the wellness movement. These may appeal to us because they are familiar, but that doesn’t mean they accurately communicate what meditation is. (My take: they don’t.)

Through our translations, we may be missing out on something important. In order to find, out, we can bypass the Western frameworks of religion and psychotherapy, and look into the words and practices as they exist in their own world.

We can look at the Sanskrit, Pali, and Tibetan languages, which are the source for most of the information on what we call meditation practice. And by source, I don’t mean “way back a long time ago”. These terms are still in active use all over the world, they mean what they mean in a fresh, everyday way.

Meditators I know use Sanskrit, Pali, and Tibetan terminology fluently, easily, happily. Not that they actually speak these languages, but the meditation vocabulary is firmly in their grasp. Without, it, talking about meditation is reduced to silly childlike ideas like “monkey mind” and “feeling centered.”

Meditation isn’t a casual practice for casual people, it’s a deep practice for open minded, energetic discoverers who aren’t afraid of adding a few more words to their vocabulary.

“Meditation” is a lazy translation that encourages laziness

As mentioned, “meditation” is a single English word that tries to do the work of many technical, specialized words from the cultures that developed meditation.

Some of the important Sanskrit words used for this practice are dhyana, samadhi, smriti,and vipashyana. (Conventional translations for these are, in order, concentration, meditative absorption, mindfulness, and direct insight.) These are not synonyms, they are deep, nuanced words that have layers of meaning appropriate to the stages of the meditation journey, they hold shades of meaning important to the overall picture. But all of them are frequently referred to as “meditation.”

Of course, if all you’re doing is trying to “tame your monkey mind” or be more “centered” you don’t need these words. But for people interested in the actual depth of the meditative experience, you can’t do without them.

In fact, there are cause-effect relationships between these words: dhyana results in samadhi. Smriti can mature into vipashyana. The single word “meditation” doesn’t even hint that such a dynamic exists. It’s a shallow word that hides meaning. In my book, that makes it a bad, or at least a profoundly lazy translation.

In Sanskrit, there is no single term that tries to unify all these words. But in English, we have “meditation” and that really is just about all we have. Are we lucky? (No, we’re lazy.)

Imagine if we only had a single word for all the creatures that live in the forests and jungles and savannas. What if they were all simply called “beasts” with no further detail? Your parents took you to the zoo, and you saw “beasts”. The tiger was just “beast.” The elephant was just “beast.” What kind of conversation could follow that trip?

Simplification keeps us small

The way this has played out in the west is that many new students think the practices they learn at first are the whole thing, they are “meditation.” When they learn that somebody else practices “meditation,” they assume that person is doing the same thing they are.

People think the Dalai Lama sits with his hands in a yoga posture and follows his breath, because that’s what they think meditation is, because that’s what they were told.

When you learn “meditation” properly, what you do in the first year is probably different from what you do after that. And as you advance, the things you do as “meditation” are far more profound and impactful. Your practice changes. The Dalai Lama is not doing what you do. He is doing something deeper. Much deeper.

In more knowledgable circles, people ask one another “what practice are you doing these days?”. That reflects a knowledge that the term meditation is too general to be useful.

True mountaineers don’t land in Nepal and ask where to find the “big mountain”. They at least know the names of the peaks, the cities, the towns, and learn a few Sherpa words. They care, they learn, they become experts.

Meditators who don’t learn the language of meditation are not meditators. You can’t talk the language of direct experience with them because they are too lazy to learn anything and thus, to know anything. They get nowhere over many years. Meditation doesn’t play nice with laziness.

This English word is under a lot of pressure

I like history when it comes to language, to see how words and associated ideas develop over time. It began when I was an undergraduate studying Greek to (slowly) read Plato. I was a poor student, but even I raised my brows at how much words depart from ancient roots.

Look at the word philosophy. Greek word first, then the modern equivalent.

Philosophia: the love of wisdom (from my education in Classics)

Philosophy: the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence, especially when considered as an academic discipline. (From my laptop’s built in dictionary.)

I’ll just say, yikes. The first inspires me, moves me to learn and explore. The second sounds like a bunch of pretentious people in a department competing for status in a dead discipline.

Meditation, the way people like me know it, is a form of the first. It is the love of wisdom, it is the proposal to wisdom, the beckoning, the heartfelt seeking. It’s what you do after you’ve pulled everything you could out of reading. Once you get to meditation, you mean business.

Anyway.

Meditation as an English word once meant its own thing. It didn’t work for someone else like it does now. It had its own history and it’s own usage, but that history has been overshadowed by our demand that it hold these ancient Sanskrit meanings, and hold them all at once.

And then we put new, seemingly random New Age meanings into the expectation, and in the 1990s, as it started to strain under too many meanings, we began to offload some of the excess into the new darling of too many meanings, mindfulness. We’ll get to that in a later post.

First let’s be rare people who actually understand what the original English word meant.

Ye olde meditation

Once upon a time, some time around the year 1250, the Latin term meditari meant “to reflect, to contemplate, to think over.” My dictionary tells me this, but I can find no examples of it anywhere, at least not anything that looked convincing. That’s as early as we can go with a root of this word. (if you are a latin scholar and can help, please leave a comment.)

Somehow, and I don’t think we know how, it made its first appearance in Middle English as “meditation” within a rule-book for nuns (the Ancrene Wisse, or Anchoresses' Guide). These would not be Buddhist nuns, of course, but nuns of whichever Christian tradition used the Anchoresses’ Guide, thought to be either Augustinian or Dominican.

Here it is for your reading pleasure, the nearly 800-year old first known use of the term meditation in English (albeit translated from Middle English):

Whatever other devotions you use in private, as Pater nosters, Hail Marys, psalms, and prayers, I am quite satisfied that every one should say that which her heart most inclines her to, a verse of her psalter, reading of English or French, holy meditations. (Translated by: Robert Hasenfratz)

That’s a significant little bit of literary history right there. Here’s a page from it:

Source: https://purl.stanford.edu/zh635rv2202. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402: Ancrene Wisse

(Honestly, I couldn’t get through it. I just gravitate toward more modern sounding stuff. Shallow, maybe, but that’s how I am.)

Now, this instruction to the nuns most definitely is not what we mean by “meditation.” The nuns of 1224 were not engaging in the practice of sitting cross-legged and following the breath, or doing any of the other stuff “meditators” do.

Still, it is a powerful indication that “meditation” had an exalted purpose in its English context. That qualifies it, somewhat, to represent the exalted practices of the ancient world. But to put 3000 years of practices into one single English world makes nuance unlikely.

So if we were trying to preserve access to these valuable practices, we didn’t work very hard. We have one word, not several, and it partly reveals, and partly obscures what it tries to represent.

Yet that isn’t even the worst of it.

Here comes the Instagram crowd

Nowadays (thanks, Instagram) the term meditation is used for things which have no “exalted” purpose at all. Just look at Tiktok, Instagram, Facebook, or Youtube. There, you will find meditation to help you…

• “Magnetize” money through harnessing a universal money vibration

• rapidly improve your health and wellness (and maybe younger skin)

• increase your focus to optimize job performance

• “manifest” the life you were born to live

And on. And on. Not exalted, not the stuff of nuns, and not the stuff of Buddhists.

When you see what people are willing to call meditation, you’ll see how unrelated the meaning can be.

Freedom to confuse

It’s a luxury of the modern world that we use language almost however we want. Freedom of speech gives us freedom to use our discretion to either preserve or degrade the access points our language gives us to rare and valuable ideas. Right now, meditation is losing its meaning, and this can remove access to something we don’t have another way into.

coming to terms anyway: a definition

So how do we solve that problem? By coming to terms.

We would only take the time to come to terms if we thought the result was worth the work. In this case, we should push forward even if we don’t yet understand why. The fact that meditation exists at all should amaze us. The fact that it didn’t develop in the modern Western nations, or come about through science should encourage us. It came about long before the “West” existed. And long before science was a thing. And yet, it unfolded and hasn’t needed tweaking in all that time. It is a true human discovery, pre-science, and pre-modernity. And nothing can touch it!

Meditation, once you see what it is, becomes really, really valuable. You’ll have long moments of jawdropped amazement when you start to see what is possible to you through taking up an activity that develops you from the inside out.

So let’s come to terms with the word “meditation”.

Meditation is the inner practice of engaging mind and awareness to remove fear and confusion.

That is the basic meaning of meditation (at least here, and most places that teach classical styles).

So now that we have a meaning, we should also be clear about what is not included in that meaning.

Meditation does not mean:

• A way of optimizing your life for better performance.

• A way of tricking the universe into giving you what you want.

• A practice aimed toward a really good feeling.*

• A relaxation or concentration exercise for its own sake.*

*It’s possible to press classical instructions to serve these goals, but good luck finding a genuine tradition willing to help you do so. And it’s far too involved (time consuming) to try this on your own. You need instruction.

These uses of the term meditation are all restricted to trends dating no further back than the 20th century. They have little (probably zero) track record, they’re just fads. Or to be blunt, they’re ads. Ads for products that will only consume your time.

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This article is part of the Meditation 101: Six Ideas to Clarify Your Practice

You can read the rest of the series by following these links:

• Mindfulness: it's been a rough 30 years.

• Mind is a little word for a big thing.

• Awareness: it's not what you know, it's how you know.

• A path makes things make sense.

• Everybody needs a teacher, because we don't have enough time to do it alone.

something real for a change

The classical practice of meditation has the most substantive track record for any undertaking with a traceable lineage. It is taught today in almost identical manner to the way it was 2500 years ago. It is tried and true, reliable, and peer-reviewed.

We shouldn’t confuse this with less serious, more fantastical practices that show up on social media and use similar sounding language. They are not the same. They aren’t even similar.

The problem arises when a 2500-year-old tradition is used to sell things that have no serious purpose. It’s a misrepresentation that obscures the real value of having such a deep tradition in our world and all it takes to maintain it for new generations.

Having images of traditional meditators in your advertisements when all you are trying to do is get people to buy your recordings of “space vibrations for love & money” is deceptive. If we want to cheapen things in our attempts to market our wares, I guess that is legal. That is, it is legal for people of no character to do things like that.

But to cheapen something that took 2500 years to develop seems reckless. Meditation does not exist to make people rich, it exists to make people free. Like the Redwoods, like the oceans, it is something worth protecting.

And true meditation is not deceptive, it is the opposite of deception: it is reality revealing.

Next in our journey, we’ll look into the part of us that meditates: the mind. This is the beginning of the reality-expanding power of good careful language.

Take care my friend,

Jeffrey

mindfulness seems to mean anything you want

This one term has lost its original ground, which is to say, it’s being used for far too many things, while not really meaning most of those things. It does mean some things, but it doesn’t mean everything marketers are trying to make it mean.

even meditators don’t agree

Remember how we talked about the word “meditation” going through a process of meaning first one thing and then another thing, and now just about everything? Mindfulness is in the same situation.

It is so overused in meditation circles that practitioners of one tradition may mean something almost unrecognizable to what practitioners from other traditions mean.

For example, though both use the word in their teachings, the popular Vipassana community doesn’t mean the same thing that the ancient Mahamudra traditions do. You wouldn’t immediately identify the similarity between the two. Vipassana uses mindfulness to mean present-moment centered, nonjudgemental awareness of what is happening in the body and mind.

Mahamudra uses mindfulness most often to refer to the fundamental self-remembering of the awakened state, or for beginners, the recognition of the awakened state that returns one to awareness after distraction.

These aren’t the same, and both of them refer to aspects of our inner beings which meditators from any traditions can understand. So even if they aren’t shared definitions, they would be points of shared understanding. What I’m trying to say here is that they are different but not points of disagreement, per se. They are divergences of emphasis among extremely sophisticated meditation traditions that all definitely know what they are doing.

But then we have modern definitions that just turn out to be bunk: no traditional Indian texts share the psychologist-approved modern meanings taught in corporations to reduce burnout and level up productivity.

I have heard so many of these that I can’t remember them. They aren’t memorable, because they aren’t useful for mediation. You don’t need a staircase to walk across a floor you are already standing on, and you don’t need trendy notions of mindfulness to tell you what you already know (relax, pay attention to your life).

and then there’s the marketers

But it’s not just within meditation, now there are fad movements in every sellable niche from business to sex to weight loss, all operating behind the word mindfulness.

When the grocery checkout counter has a magazine dedicated to something, it’s probably not for you. The books at the library on the same topic — those are for you.

You don’t know what someone means when they say this word anymore. Their “mindfulness” — what is it? Is it meditation? Probably not. Maybe it’s self-help, or their life-hack toward minimalism, or decluttering, or making money in a more “sustainable” way.

All this tries to live inside one word. We’ve been here before.

Too much of a good thing: the tipping point cycle

Remember Taoism? If you walked through bookstores in the 1980s, you saw the same thing happening to the word Tao. I saw it go through three phases: pre-tipping point of obscurity, tipping point of great expansion, and post tipping point/meaningless sellout.

1. First, tao meant the central conception of the Chinese tradition, Taoism. Not many people were aware of it, but those who were had translations of a few seminal texts to study. It was pre-fad, pre-tipping point. Obscure things of interest only to dedicated meditators, like Yogachara-Madhyamaka, or Dzogchen, are still at the pre-tipping point in 2025.

2. Then, for some reason, it caught on and became a popular thing for translators to expand: Tao te Ching, Chuang Tzu, Sun Tzu (Art of War, kind of Taoist -adjacent reading, very popular) and of course the many translations of Thomas Cleary. This was the full-fad, the tipping point stage. Mahamudra is at this point right now.

3. Then it meant “the word you put on a book jacket to sell your scheme.” This is the post-tipping point, where it became more of a vibe. In current days, “tantra” has been here for a long time, becoming meaningless and empty, almost automatically associated with sex (inaccurately so, as the tens of thousands of monastic tantric practitioners demonstrate). And now Zen has reached this moment, sad to say. (Not actual Zen practice, just the notion of Zen, as in, “find your zen.”)

By the 1990s tao had as much to do with finding your edge in Wall Street as it did anything deep. Then, as all things eventually must, it was pulled into books on sex. The tao of sex. I am not even going to check amazon right now to see if that is a published title. It must be.

Mindfulness is full-blown tipping point sellout stuff now. I can only imagine that teachers from traditions which rely on the term mindfulness in its legitimate context are laying awake at night wondering how to navigate the nightmare. I feel for them. If that ever happens to my traditions (mahamudra and dzogchen) I’ll leave society.

Ok, enough of that.

Despite all this, it’s an important word

Keeping to our mission, let’s talk about mindfulness only in the context of meditation, not in selling magazines to busy, stressed out people.

And also in keeping to our mission, let’s reiterate our terms. First, our definition of meditation:

Meditation is a method of working with mind and awareness to free ourself from fear and confusion.

Mindfulness has at least two very different definitions in meditation instruction. Let’s take a look, because they are both very helpful. They are two very good meanings that make a big difference in the practice of freeing ourselves from fear and confusion.

First things first: where’s the word come from?

India.

The word mindfulness goes all the way back to ancient Indian literature and beyond. There you find two vital words each translated as “mindfulness.” Smrti, and sati. That first word looks hard to pronounce. But it’s actually easy: “smree-tee”. Said quickly, like “T.V.” Go ahead: give it a try.

Did you do it? If so, you spoke one of the most impactful words in human spirituality. Smrti has been in continuous use for 4000 years. Think about that. It’s been used in the same way all that time. And we just used it here, in 2024. It means right now what it meant all the way back then.

4000 years of continuous use. That’s when you know a word must mean something important.

The other word, sati, is still very old, but came later. It means the same thing, and lots of meditators use it instead of smrti.

These two words are from slightly different dialects of ancient India: Sanskrit (smrti) and Pali (sati). Both are major resources for meditative literature. That’s it for today’s history and linguistic lesson. Let’s dive into the meaning.

mindfulness in translation

There are no popular contenders to the word mindfulness, it’s what nearly every translator uses, so we’ll use it too.

In a refreshing coincidence of harmony, I have no quarrel with it, because it really does a great job at meaning what all those ancient words mean. On top of that, it’s a good old English word going back to the 1500s (“myndfulness”). Sometimes things work out!

Remember of course, Indian meditators didn’t use the term mindfulness, because it didn’t exist yet, because English didn’t exist yet.

And in English, myndfulness/mindfulness wasn’t pressed into meaning “meditation” until 100 years ago, after which it lost much of its original identity. It had 400 years to be a good English word before it was taken over by the need to translate Sanskrit.

It still lives in the shelter of the English underground transit, where you hear “mind the gap” at regular intervals over the intercom. It means, don’t fall onto the rails, which isn’t the same intention in mediation. But it achieves this message by using the term “mind” as a verb. Mind the gap. Don’t be mindless and fall onto the rails.

That preserves some of the original meaning, and also bridges into the ancient Indian meaning too. That’s part of what makes it such a good translation1.

In its ancient Indian meaning, mindfulness (smrti/sati) means: memory, recollection, retention of information, collectedness.

But if only it were that simple. Actually, this is a point where high level “controversy” comes in. Nothing discouraging, nothing divisive, it’s just that there is a solid disagreement that shapes modern meditation traditions. And it will make us smarter just hearing about it.

Stuff or no stuff?

Historically, mindfulness (smrti/sati) implied keeping in mind the essential teachings of the path: the understanding of impermanence, nonself, and so forth. Mindfulness meant, at least in part, to maintain a relationship to this understanding.

And that means mindfulness keeps information in mind. It retains stuff. It has to, right? How else is it going to be “mindful” of something it learned? I want my doctor to be mindful of anatomy when they poke me. They need to remember that my arm and my eyeball are two different things. (Modern exponents of this view would be Achaan Cha, and Bhikku Bodi). To me it appears to be what the historical Buddha taught, and it is what I learned in grad school when we looked at those old sources.

But things changed: a modern turn, sometime in the mid 1900s in South Asian practice (Mahasai Sayadaw and Nyanaponika Thera, etc.) removed the stuff altogether, and argued that mindfulness is a type of bare attention on the present moment. In this use, there is no stuff, only the present moment into and out of which stuff comes and goes.

These two meanings are different, yet genuine traditions that pursue the same goal find ways to operate with the differences of meaning in this one word. I like both of these traditions, and I like the teachers from each side of the “disagreement.”

I lean toward the first definition of mindfulness, but then again, my meditation training didn’t emphasize mindfulness, it emphasized awareness (which we’ll talk about in another post). In awareness, there is no retention of knowledge, it is more like the second meaning of mindfulness: bare experience.

So to me, mindfulness includes an understanding of the nature of the relative world: impermanent, encouraging fixation and grasping, and essentially empty. In my tradition, and in the way I teach, mindfulness is a knowledgeable state of mind that is free from clinging and fixation.

Just to be clear: I am cool with both definitions. These are great traditions either way you go.

two camps, one campfire?

So now we have two competing meanings.

The original, basic word meant “memory” and was used by the Buddha to teach meditation. And the Buddha seems to have implied that mindfulness would include knowing things, keeping a wise outlook, not forgetting essential information. Just like a surgeon has some level of anatomy and technique in mind during a procedure, a meditator also is loaded up with training that is kept in mind even during meditation.

And now we have this modern interpretation, popular in recent meditation communities, where mindfulness signifies bare attention to the present moment.

Both share some things: In meditation, they often mean being collected rather than distracted, or present to what is actually here. Whether or not that collectedness includes information one tries to maintain, such as a meditation instruction or a teaching on reality, is up for debate.

But nobody is going to win that debate, the traditions are dug in where they stand.

This isn’t a big deal for us, it just means we have to recognize which meaning we are depending on in the type of meditation we’ve learned.

Example: what I teach

I teach Finding Ground Meditation, which is my presentation of the Mahamudra system of India and Tibet. My teachers, and I along with them, use mindfulness in a specific way that simply means being attentive to one’s current state of being, and recognizing its characteristic of impermanence, emptiness, and the painful result of trying to cling to it or solidify it into something lasting.

This simple way of talking about mindfulness works because we have a rich way of talking about other parts of meditation that some traditions don’t have. In other words, we have a rich vocabulary that doesn’t need to pack everything into one word. Mindfulness is an important part, but a somewhat smaller part, of our instructions. And that is notably different.

Words can define traditions

For some traditions, the practice is “mindfulness.” That’s it, that’s the whole thing. As in, “what do you practice” “I practice mindfulness.”

For other traditions, especially those with more ancient roots, mindfulness can mean the development of sustained attention in meditation, and it can also mean luminous awareness of the sensory and mental world.

Not only that, it can be dynamic. The meaning attributed to it within a tradition may shift as practice becomes more and more powerful and advanced instructions replace preliminary instructions. The “mindfulness” you begin with is transformed into a more potent, more effortless mindfulness later on. As you grow, so do the elements of your vocabulary.

Finding Ground Meditation follows the approach of a classical system. Here, “mindfulness” is an important part of the mind, and you need it to practice meditation. You begin meditation by developing mindfulness, and then you graduate to a deeper type of mindfulness,— an effortless style of maintaining awareness, which begins to stabilize itself from within itself. That’s deep stuff right there!

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Putting it all together

In the practice of meditation, one learns to strengthen mindfulness so that they can disentangle themselves from patterns of fear and confusion that have been born from lack of mindfulness.

At first, meditation reverses the damage done through weakened mindfulness. This accomplishes a level of healing, making us fit for a further journey. When the healing is well underway, some traditions of meditation transition the emphasis from mindfulness to awareness. Finding Ground, along with Mahamudra and other awareness-based traditions, does this.

Our foray into mind and mindfulness paves the way to talk about the most important idea so far: awareness.

Mind is the part of us that knows the things in the world, awareness is the part of us that knows ourself.

Awareness is a very subtle quality of our being, and training it through meditation accomplishes great things. Awareness is the domain of real transformation, and that’s what we’ll talk about next.

Jeffrey

This article is part of the Meditation 101: Six Ideas to Clarify Your Practice

You can read the rest of the series by following these links:

• Meditation is a fragile word. Use carefully.

• Mind is a little word for a big thing.

• Awareness: it's not what you know, it's how you know.

• A path makes things make sense.

• Everybody needs a teacher, because we don't have enough time to do it alone.