Right Effort
One of the challenges with learning to meditate is that you’re not able to see what your teacher or student is actually “doing” when they meditate. We have to rely on second hand descriptions of how to meditate effectively, and attempts to describe what happened when we tried to execute a set of instructions. When we learn most skills we are able to watch professionals demonstrate what they are talking about at amazingly adept levels, and we can mimic what we see and derive inspiration from it.
Because we are stuck playing this unfortunate telephone-game, we are more susceptible to miscommunication and having key ideas lost in translation. I’ve decided to begin writing a series of short blog posts about important concepts that were lost in translation when I began learning to meditate 16 years ago. It’s not that people didn’t try to tell me these things, they are just important nuggets that I didn’t fully absorb until later in my meditation career.
I will begin today with what I believe to be the most important foundation for meditating effectively: Right Effort. Right Effort is the balance we all must find between “trying super hard” and not trying at all. If we exert too much effort we can create unnecessary stress for ourselves and our striving becomes counterproductive. If we don’t exert any effort we will likely spend the whole meditation daydreaming, or we will fall asleep. We will know we have found some degree of balance when we are both alert and relaxed at the same time.
Dialing in this balance can be an interesting meta-meditation. Our attention is focused on the quality of our attention. We are getting the tool we use to meditate sharp, before we begin to point it at an object such as our breath.
The standard instruction I used to receive from my teacher was, “focus as intently on your object of meditation as you can, without straining”. In other words, you should exert the maximum amount of effort on following the meditation instructions, that does not result in you feeling as if you’re straining (whatever straining means to you). I have found this heuristic to be useful over the years, and it is one that I still fall back on when trying to dial in a nice balance. The next time you sit down to meditate, try spending at least a few minutes experimenting with this balance of effort versus non-effort, and let me know how it goes!
-Christian