Non-striving in Meditation

When clients come to me to learn how to meditate, most people come with an agenda. Some want to learn how to meditate to understand their own psyche better, others want to strengthen their concentration and reduce impulsivity in order to manage their ADHD. Many people use meditation to deal with anxiety or to improve their mood. Over the years, I’ve had clients who wanted to learn how to meditate to use meditation to help their spiritual path. Agendas can be different, but they are there most of the time.

I often say that I don’t know why I meditate and I even find the question slightly frustrating – no doubt because of my inability to fully articulate an answer – but even though I don’t know why, I still do it. I often talk about the moment I first meditated and the insight I had when I opened my eyes afterwards: I don’t know what this was, but I know I need more of it. In other words, I had discovered a need I didn’t know I had and meditation was, and twenty years later, still is, the way to meet that need. My agenda, therefore, may not be verbally the most articulated agenda in the world, but it’s there.

This is all fine and normal. In fact, the “why” question is likely to be posed to anyone who takes a meditation course. I ask it too even though I hate it, because knowing why you meditate plays an important part in your journey. Your motivation can change over the years, but it is important to understand yourself and to do so clearly. Meditation is not just something you do from time to time. It’s a practice that becomes a significant part of your every day and it slowly and fundamentally alters your relationship to your own self, to your thoughts, feelings, it even changes your relationships by making you more patient and compassionate. To keep up with meditation long enough to allow it to transform you in all these complex ways, you need to connect it to who you are now, to what you think of as your values. For something to become a habit, it has to be meaningful enough to be repeated sufficiently. You can’t be vague about what you want to achieve and expect yourself to show any discipline on the journey. 

Now I’m going to change my tune and go in a completely different direction and seemingly contradict myself.Ah, such is life!

One of the most important things you can do when you sit down and meditate is to give up on any ambition or goal. This is called non-striving. When you sit and begin to meditate, you set no immediate goals. You don’t expect serenity or calm, you don’t expect focus or distractions. You just sit and see what happens, you approach the situation with utmost curiosity and detachment. 

Jon Kabat – Zinn calls this the being mode. The being mode is the opposite of the doing mode – which is our default mode for most of our days here on Earth. There are always errands to run, things to do, goals to achieve, dishes to wash, reports to finalize, house to clean, roofs to fix, etc. When I talk to my clients or look at my own notes, we all seem to have never-ending and self-generating to-do lists that could keep us doing and doing until the ends of our lives. We live in a culture that insists on productivity at all costs. People who don’t conform to this ridiculous demand are often deemed lazy. When we drink that kool aid we feel guilty and, consequently, develop low sense of self-worth. Research and clinical experience tell a different story. While “Type A” personalities do achieve a lot and while their productivity may be off the charts, they are unhappy and less healthy on average than other people. All that achievement comes at a cost. It takes a huge psychological and physical toll on a person.

Meditation is the opposite of doing. There’s just being. Buddha famously said: there is no where to go and nothing to do. And when you’re meditating, you have the unique opportunity to truly embody that short but powerful sentence. You sit and you do nothing. You just watch and accept whatever arises. Is it a bad memory? Accept and let it go. Is it physical discomfort? Accept and let it go. Do you get lost in thoughts about work? Accept it and let it go. Do you feel euphoric? Accept and let it go. Is it sexual arousal? Accept and let it go. You get the pattern, I hope.

The attitude of non-striving tells you that you don’t have to achieve anything while you’re on the cushion. Whatever happens is OK. The only task you have is to be there and be aware. Jon Kabat-Zinn writes: “You might be tempted to avoid the messiness of daily living for the tranquility of stillness and peacefulness. This of course would be an attachment to stillness, and like any strong attachment, it leads to delusion. It arrests development and short-circuits the cultivation of wisdom.”

Taking a few moments every day to go into the being mode is a profound act of self-love. It’s a break from having to carry the burden of social roles and social rules and just opening up to pure awareness and resting in it, whatever that awareness may be filled with. Whether your experience of non-striving in meditation results in a beautiful, serene session or a difficult, intense one, it doesn’t matter. By resting in awareness and just being, you are not any of those experiences. You are the awareness itself - boundless and unperturbed. 

This may seem at odds with where I started: the importance of knowing why you want to learn how to meditate. And perhaps it is slightly paradoxical, but here it is: by giving up on goals in meditation you will achieve your goals more easily. Striving means that you’re grasping at a particular outcome of a practice firmly grounded in letting go. It makes meditation difficult if not impossible.

Non-striving doesn’t mean that you need to give up on your career and retreat into the woods or that you have to suddenly be like Diogenes, half-naked and without possessions, or that you give up on so many beliefs that you have to be stopped from walking off the cliff like Pyrrho because you know that a cliff is nothing but a belief. I’m not talking about anything extreme. Just a short break from cultural conditioning and burdens of everyday life.

  All this is much better put by Anne Sexton in her poem From the Garden. Here’s an excerpt:

Come, my beloved,

consider the lilies.

We are of little faith.

We talk too much.

Put your mouthful of words away

and come with me to watch

the lilies open in such a field,

growing there like yachts,

slowly steering their petals

without nurses or clocks.

Later on in the poem, Sexton invites us to throw away our words like stones – solid, definite, dead, and look at the lilies, be with the lilies beyond concepts, expectations and even time. Our experience is wild and always in motion, it can’t be cut up into little pieces and labeled with words without losing its beautiful wholeness. 

You have to know why you’re undertaking this wonderful and challenging journey so that you can find the motivation to stick with meditation and go through all the challenging periods, those that help you grow the most. Meditation is not an easy road to take. It’s full of obstacles and challenges. At the same time, it’s a journey that truly has no destination, so strong motivation has to be present for you to stick with it. But there is a time for everything. When you sit down to meditate, it is time to give up your goals in order to later attain them.

Is it a paradox? Most certainly. How do you resolve it? By experiencing it in meditation.