Effortless Meditation

The Right Amount of Effort in Meditation

Firstly
effort in meditation is not a dirty word. Diligence, patience, and
persistence have long been a stable backbone of meditation training and
have their place. Also, to start meditation it’s vitally important to
know what to do and what not to do. It takes skill that becomes
increasingly more subtle to become self-aware of the processes of the
mind. 


You can read my instructions for essential meditation practice
HERE where I balance the effort of mindfulness with the non-effort of just being in meditation.

 
The
key element and effort required in mindfulness meditation is to know
when you are focusing on your object of meditation, usually your breath,
and when you’re distracted. When you notice you’re distracted, you use
effort to guide the mind back to the task at hand.

 
In
classical Buddhism there is a meta cognition at work diligently
watching and making sure you’re performing your task of not getting
distracted. This internal ‘watchdog’ also ensures that you’re not too
sleepy and you’re not too excited even when you’re not distracted and
your paying attention to your object of meditation.

 
All
this requires effort and diligence and becomes the familiar playground
of the meditator. Watching your attention and making big and subtle
adjustments. If you’re too sleepy you need to adjust yourself to awaken
more and if you’re too excited, you need to adjust yourself to calm
down.

 
So
essentially it takes effort to keep watch and make adjustments to your
attention. However, if you don’t discover the effortless part of this
process you can remain in this effortful practice of meditation for
years without ever realizing a calm mind. It can make you hyper vigilant
and meditation can even turn into a stressful practice. 

Getting the Balance Right

The
actual effortlessness in mindfulness meditation is learning when to do
nothing. When you’re distracted that’s not the time to do nothing,
that’s when you need effort to bring the mind home to the present
object. But once you’re attention is settled on the breath you can start
to do less and less until you’re doing nothing at all. The reason this
works is because clear non-distracted presence is actually a natural
part of the nature of mind. The effort of mindfulness is to clear away
distraction to uncover the potential of your natural calm presence.

 
Once
you’ve caught distraction and guided your attention back home to the
present moment and you’ve caught and adjusted to the subtle dullness and
over excitement that muddy your clarity, you can now relax and do
nothing. This is the effortless part of mindfulness; to abide on your
object of meditation simply and calmly without making any adjustments or
modifications at all.

This
is the real effortlessness of mindfulness meditation. Tibetan masters
would instruct that at this point there’s nothing to do, nothing to add
and nothing to remove. I usually call it ‘just being’ in my
instructions.

 
To
continually make adjustments and to think about whether your meditation
is working or not just becomes another obstacle in an endless game of
cat and mouse. This is called over applying effort which implies there
needs to be a balance or at least the correct amount of effort before
you let go.

 
It
can be difficult to let go of the effort to adjust and modify your
meditation but a good way to monitor progress is noticing your ability
to watch the breath without controlling it. This is the key to doing
nothing and letting go of effort to become the naturally calm observer.
When you watch the breath the tendency is to control it. But when you
can observe your breath ‘breathing itself’ you are well on the way to
finding effortlessness.

To
simply rest on the breath, doing nothing but paying attention, a
certain calm presence of mind emerges. It’s becoming familiar with this
calm presence that constitutes genuine meditation practice. The more
familiar you become with this natural calm presence within formal
meditation then you can begin to integrate this effortless wisdom into
every aspect of your life. The art of doing nothing is the integrated
‘non-action’ into your everyday behaviour. You can read more about it
HERE.
 
In
conclusion I’d like to leave you with a very powerful and simple
meditation instruction from Tantric Buddhism which includes effort and
non-effort, it says “there’s absolutely nothing to meditate on but don’t
get distracted.” Here we have the effortless way to meditate which is
not to focus on anything or strive for anything in particular but making
effort to not get distracted from your natural effortless awareness.   

Written by Chad Foreman

Chad
is the founder of The Way of Meditation and has been teaching
meditation since 2003 and is determined to bring authentic meditation
practices into the lives of millions of people in the modern world. Chad
is a former Buddhist monk who spent 6 years living in a retreat hut
studying and practicing meditation full time. Chad now offers Online Meditation Coaching and has also developed an incredible course called The 21 Day Meditation Challenge to
help guide people gradually from the basics of mindfulness and
relaxation to profound states of awareness. And now you can read Chad’s
free e-book Insights Along the Way.