Progress in Meditation: Focused Work
This post is a copy of my response to the question of what I considered to be progress in meditation using an example of a persistent problem which previously prevented me from putting in good work.
I could probably explain what I consider to be progress in the simplest way in the effects I see in real life, and then break it down into the constituent factors. Let’s take something seemingly simple, in the past I used to really have trouble listening — especially in cases where a boss/supervisor was talking to me about my projects. And I tried all sorts of workarounds — all sorts of external techniques from listicles and how-to-articles to try and get better at it. Nothing had really worked and then one day at a very specific moment I had a sudden realization . This realization led to an immediate and irreversible transformation in my behavior.
In the past whenever a manager spoke to me about my projects, I got strong internal reactions arising from scripts playing in my head which were trying to establish certain interpretation of what was going on. These scripts were a result of conditioning — the way I had reacted to similar situations in the past. Since the scripts were based on past conditioning, they were incongruent with the present moment reality, and since the past conditioning was not pleasant the habitual response was fear. When this fear came along, the mind would react to the fear with its habitual fight or flight or freeze reaction. Additionally, since the sensations which accompany fear are unpleasant, there was a habitual aversion to the fear — a strong urge to make this unpleasantness go away. All of these were happening while the manager was speaking which made it difficult to listen. While it was not apparent at the time, this problem was strangely similar to the ones I had been dealing with in my normal on-cushion meditation practices.
I had been practicing hard in the months leading up to the sudden realization. I had returned from the 10-day vipassana retreat on the day before my new job in San Francisco, and had been putting in an hour of dedicated practice Monday through Thursday at the San Francisco Vipassana Hall after work from 6–7 pm. In these sessions, which involved an initial 10-ish minutes of Anapanasati followed by about 45 minutes of equanimous body scan, I had been practicing the ability to stay calm in the presence of conditioned formations. When the conditioned formations arose, say as in the previous example of the manager conversation, in the form of a memory or thought accompanied by the feeling of fear, and there was a habitual reaction of aversion to this fear, the practice was to simply note the physical sensation caused by the aversion and the fear instead of further reacting to the fear or the aversion. During the on-cushion meditation, I had noticed that my habitual reaction to fear had characteristic sensations of tightening of the belly, drying of the nostrils, clenching of the palm muscles among others. During these meditations, I had practiced, letting go of the clenching in the face of a fear response in order to experience the seemingly fearful stimulus more directly. Doing this allowed me to generally reprogram my response to the specific stimulus from the previous conditioned reaction of fear to more of an understanding. Without digressing too much, in the past fear had been the go-to response for these mental situations. However, seeing these conditioned formations more clearly after having overcome fear, I was able to see that a completely different reaction (mostly kindness, appreciation, forgiveness or even excitement or adventure or maybe even caution) was more appropriate. These shifts in perspective are relatively much easier to accomplish from a calm stillness induced by Anapanasati, performing the same in the noise of everyday interactions, as I’m sure you already know, is significantly harder.
At the moment of the transformation my manager was speaking to me about a project I was leading. As I was trying hard to listen to what he was saying, I noticed the same sensation of clenching of the belly which I had noticed during my meditation sessions. I had seen this one before and knew how to deal with it. This time, instead of engaging in the habitual flight reaction of wanting the conversation to end, or the fight reaction of prematurely thinking of what to say next, I simply fell back on the awareness of the breath and watched the habitual urges which I now knew was in response to the fear. I watched the physical sensations which had arisen due to aversion to fear, and once those passed, I watched the physical sensations which had arisen due to fear. Once I stayed aware of the fear, I was able to see fear as separate from what was going on, which was the stuff my manager was saying about the project. This was the first single instance of an action, where I had listened to the manager without having reacted to fear, and as such had created a proof of concept for myself that it could be done. It was momentous.
Over the next few weeks, I continued this practice until I was able to be present with the conversations about my project while also acknowledging fear. As such, fear had stopped having a control over my reactions, and I had overwritten my unconscious conditioned habit pattern with a more deliberate and skillful habit pattern. Moreover, this was also a proof of concept for the overwriting process, whereby other unskillful conditioned habit patterns could be overwritten by similar skillful habit patterns, and that since the overwriting process had been successfully completed once, I was also creating a skillful overwriting habit. These, to me, are some great examples of progress in meditation.
