Imperfect Meditation Practice Is the Only Meditation Practice

I am amused by feedback and always very grateful to get it. I welcome it because it helps me become better at what I do. Often, people who share their feedback offer valuable input and suggest topics that I can talk or write about that would never occur to me but seem fantastically appropriate once suggested. But at the same time, it amuses me how much it reveals about the people who provide the feedback – a simple sentence can reveal so much! This goes for the feedback that I give too – needless to say. After all, to give feedback we have to reveal our own constructs about the topic involved. Feedback sometimes mirrors back something I do but don’t see – that’s always uncomfortable and precious, perhaps the most important kind.

Last week I received an email with genuinely well-meaning feedback regarding the free weekly guided meditations we provide at Four Steps Coaching. The person in question enjoys them and downloads them every week, but on one of the recordings, he could hear a dog bark somewhere in the background and a car or two passing by in another meditation from a month ago. On several occasions, I broke down my sentences in unnatural places, and whereas this wasn’t a deal breaker, it wasn’t “ideal” either. He suggests that I use some background music to cover up those sounds and to make the experience more pleasant, and to read my script with more fluency. This last made me laugh as there is no script. I close my eyes and guide you through what I usually do – but shhhh don’t tell anyone.

The rest of it is completely true, I admit it and it’s not likely to change. I have no control over cars passing by and dogs barking so who knows? Anything’s possible. I do have control over the editing, you may say and you’d be right, but I don’t mind a car passing by. Meditation is not supposed to transport you into an ideal world, it’s supposed to help you observe your own experience as it unfolds, and if there is a sound of a car passing by then that sound is a part of your experience.

This post, however, is about the word “ideal” and my relationship to it, especially when it comes to meditation. It’s not a complex relationship and it’s easy to summarize. Here it goes, I hope I can state it clearly enough: I’m against it.

I don’t do anything perfectly and haven’t done anything perfectly in my entirely life. Nothing about me is ideal and I’m proud to say, I don’t strive to make anything ideal. I have ideals but I also have paintings on my walls – so what? It’s an image like any other and it has nothing to do with reality. Even with things where my snobbishness goes through the roof, such as when it comes to my taste in art or music, I don’t care for ideal performances or perfect executions of anything. All of it deeply bores me.

I did a little meditation yesterday. I grounded myself and after focusing on my breath for some time, I gently started repeating the question: what is ideal? My focus was on the question and I would label the thoughts, feelings, memories and images that would arise. Some of the associations were that time when I had to play Mozart and everyone thought it was perfect (and I was utterly uninterested in what my fingers were doing), Jacques-Louis David’s art, Coldplay, Terrence Malik and Kubrick movies, etc. The meditation was half an hour long, too many things happened to list them all. But what they all had in common was the following: the ideal is what’s done according to all the rules with very little passion, it’s something that doesn’t disturb me in any way, it’s symmetrical, it’s elegant, crafted beyond reproach, it’s bland and, ultimately, boring.

Would I want to my life to be perfect? Obviously, no. Would I want my meditation to be perfect? No.

There is no such thing as an ideal guided meditation or an ideal meditation practice, and most certainly no such thing as an ideal meditation sitting. Blissful or pleasant, meditation is just meditation, and as such it’s always imperfect. One of the associations I had to the word “ideal” was the word “static” – and that’s not possible in meditation. Our experience is continuously unfolding and changing, so there is no ideal, there’s just mutating imperfection. My all-time favorite once said that universe is always in motion and so, people in it are just forms of motion. We never stand still and we can never be perfect.

One of the reasons I don’t edit those meditations and why some degree of external noise finds its way there (I do my very best to reduce it, I promise) is because I’m not very interested in creating a cozy experience for you – meditation is serious business. If you’re supposed to meditate on forgiveness and your main problem is two seconds of background noise – your attention is on the wrong thing. Forgiveness meditation (I believe that’s the one where you can hear the damn car) is emotionally quite intense and demanding. As I was recording it and doing it at the same time, I was hardly aware of anything but the content. In fact, I had to record it twice, because the first time I forgot that I was recording and stopped giving guidance out loud.

When I guide you through a meditation, I want you to have an experience, and whatever your emotional or cognitive response to my unnaturally broken sentence may be, that’s a part of your experience. Examine the feeling, look at the thoughts, learn about yourself, let go and go back to the object of meditation. That’s all. If your reaction is anything beyond a mere distraction, do the meditation again and study your emotions. Here’s a chance for you to do some introspection.

Presenting myself as an ideal teacher feels deeply threatening to me. And it’s not because I doubt my ability to teach meditation. I quite like doing it actually and I’m not bad at it. I also like to use it in psychotherapy, although that’s a whole different ballgame than just teaching meditation.  If I were to present myself as a perfect teacher that would be a lie, because I am far from it. Maintaining such a big lie would require the amount of attention, effort and energy that I don’t think anything in this world deserves. It’s just much easier to be imperfect and at ease with it. I can’t imagine how much good one can do by pouring all that energy into something useful, instead of in the process of maintaining an image that is basically a lie.

Whenever I hear the word “ideal” in the context of a teacher or a therapist, I think of either transference (“I idealize him/her”, I’m projecting) or I hear a fraud, along with transference – every teacher that wants to be your ideal guru is not the teacher for you. Imperfect people need imperfect teachers.

Nothing’s ideal. Meditation is supposed to help us come to terms with that.