crazy meditation instruction
Posted by Clarity on 12 Nov 2006 at 08:23 am | Tagged as: Uncategorized
Sometimes I’m quite surprised with the meditation instructions I come up with. 
Like just now, I was talking to a student who is going through some rough time in her life and is avoiding meditation and anything to do with practice.
So as we talked we came up with the next plan: for the next week, her discipline is going to be to absolutely avoid any meditation practice whatsoever.
And during the day she should try to be as unmindful as possible.
If by any chance she should let go of her unmindfulness discipline and should get even an inkling that she should sit, she should immediately apply her discipline and not give in to temptation.
I’m quite curios as to how it’ll go.
What do you think about why I gave her this instruction?
I personally think it is a great instruction. I took up similar practice when I had troubles in my life and could not meditate, concentrate,…
Or make somebody write such a long commentary! 
I took it for this reasons:
1) It is good that you do not abandon your practice. If you are not able to continue with the normal, everyday routine it is good to change the routine but practice everyday. Otherwise you will get lazy and will not start your normal practice even when the time of trouble is over.
2) If you are unable to focus, be mindful, meditate, be aware,… forcing yourself into that states will do no good. It will only make you hate this practices. To meditate on force is not a good thing…
3) Being completely unmindful, unaware,… is a good training to be completely mindful, aware. Since controlling the other extreme takes as much skill as it takes to control the “normal” one. When you are trying to be completely unmindful your mind, ego,… starts to battle with you, since you are trying to control it (again). And it will force you in the direction you hope to go…
This are the reasons I took similar practice. After a while, when the situation around me calmed, I noticed the desire to return to normal practice.
I hope there is sense in the words I wrote. I hope you will not say that you gave her this practice just to amuse yourself and piss her off
Hello Luka,
I’m not quite sure I follow you on 1., as the instruction I gave her explicitly told her NOT to meditate in any way or form.
But yes, other two I are quite on the mark.
Basically, when you get so caught up that there is no space, you have to do something different to break the cycle you’re in. In this case, this instruction did this.
When there’s more space, your innate intelligence has the opportunity to blossom and you can see things more clearly.
During the interview though, it was just an intuition that this would be helpful for her, the explanation about it came later when i thought about it.
as for the results, it seems to be working extremely well!
How can she not meditate in any way or form? To meditate is to be aware and at the moment she became aware of the fact that she is aware she is meditating. If she became aware that she do not meditate and that she is following your instructions she is meditating. Ah, I see now… She had to abandon awareness.
As for my 1. I was referring to the practice not in a way of meditation. I usually meditate when I wake up. When I was not in a bed condition I deliberately spent the time I used to spend for meditation for something else, for example programming or reading a book or managing my homepage. The unspoken purpose was to replace meditation with another activity, that would put my mind to something else.
Otherwise excellent and inspiring description of how to help somebody. Usually you get advices such as force yourself, do it anyway, no matter how hard it is or try to meditate, but even if you do not succeed force yourself in that position for normal meditation time. You on the other hand gave advice in a seance of abandoning and cutting loose of the strings of habit.
You’re exactly getting the point.
Trying not to be aware is of course quite impossible, as that requires awareness. But you trick the ego, since it thinks this is not meditation. 
For this week, the instruction is to be as aware as possible, and not to miss any meditation sessions at all. No matter what. Just no debate at all about it.
It’ll be interesting to see the contrast.