Some of us come to meditation for health. Some because we want secret knowledge/superpowers. Others at the recommendation of a friend, or maybe idle curiosity. There’s really no difference when it comes to the main process: you meditate a little every day and whatever you wanted out of it will be made more clear. That clarity doesn’t happen without consistent practice over the course of years, though other nice things happen well before then.
In an on-demand, instant results, productivity-is-god world, this idea of tectonic change is anathema. And since we tend to luxuriate in our own bullshit, we want change without changing, we become suspicious of things that genuinely do us good. If we try something to make ourselves feel better and it doesn’t work right away, we conclude it must not work at all. The trick with meditation is that it “works” right away, but we lack the conscious awareness to feel it usually. It is more commonly a water effect. The more steadily we drip our practice into the jar of our life, the fuller it becomes with the part that “works”: our feeling of peace or No Homework that I mention in the Start Here episode of the podcast series. If we stick with it, we eventually are able to discern between things we merely want, and things that do us genuine good.
This inside out process then creates the foundation for the rest of our lives. Modern science says that mammals usually learn their world by venturing out from and returning to the safe space they experience with the mother. With meditation, even if we don’t have this experience with our literal mother, we learn to create and maintain this safe space within ourselves. From there, we can go out to the work of the world from a more easeful place. If we continue the jar analogy, our practice can gradually shift and dissolve whatever we may be keeping in our jar that blocks our feeling of safety, making life feel more manageable.
A foundation like this takes time to build. In the meantime, many world traditions give us guidelines regarding things we can do that are genuinely good for us. I’m referring to the Eightfold Path in Buddhism, Raja Yoga, and similar solutions worldwide. These are outside in activities- things that don’t address the root issue, but support our work to that end. I sometimes refer to these as plugins. Plugins aren’t required- we don’t actually need anything but our meditation practice. It is the practice that enlivens them, but they can help us to stay on our path, make it easier to give our practice pride of place. And until we know what will genuinely do us good, they can be vital guideposts. Further, they can connect us to a tradition, bolstering our sense of security, and they often take into account whole health in a much more far-reaching way than modern materialist approaches. My teacher says: “Be Good. Be good for your health and be good for society.” Plugins give us the trustworthy tools with which to implement this advice, while meditation gives us the stable underpinning.
When we establish daily meditation first, then add plugins, we create a positive feedback loop. Our practice feeds our life which feeds our practice. Then we have started down a path where we learn to operate from our internal safe space. In this way, I disagree with the idea that “life begins outside your comfort zone”. So much better, to my mind, to have a place of safe retreat within you. Then nothing is outside your comfort zone, and you begin to learn how to be good.