Why Meditation Should Be Effortless
People are often surprised to hear that meditation should be effortless, that no striving or concentration is needed. I know I was. When I first became interested in meditation, I was repeatedly told that it took great mental discipline and many years of practice. Indian teachers had likened the mind to a wagonload of restless monkeys that needed to be tied down and kept quiet.
My experience seemed to confirm it. My mind was full of thoughts, and try as I might, I couldn’t keep them at bay. Like many others, I naturally assumed that I was not trying hard enough; I needed greater mental discipline, not less.
Then I chanced upon Transcendental Meditation. Its teacher, the Maharishi of Beatles’ fame, challenged the whole notion of trying to control the mind. The monkeys, he pointed out, were wanting something—more bananas perhaps. Give them what they want and they will settle down of their own accord.
The same, he suggested, is true of the mind; it is restless because we are seeking something. What is it we are seeking? In the final analysis, we all want to feel better—to be happier, more at peace, at ease, and content. He argued that if we give the mind a taste of the inner contentment it is looking for, it will be attracted to it and begin to settle down by itself.
This made more sense to me than what I’d come across so far, so I learned his practice. And it worked. I found my mind becoming quiet without any effort. Indeed, as soon as I started trying to control the process, in the hope that I could somehow help my meditation along, it did not work so well.
I’m not suggesting that this applies to every type of meditation. Techniques designed to cultivate particular mental skills or states of mind may well involve a degree of concentration or mental discipline. But when it comes to the basic skill of relaxing into a quieter state of consciousness, effort generally turns out to be counter-productive.
We do not need to do anything for the mind to become quiet—indeed it is often our focus on “doing” that keeps it active. A quiet mind is the mind in its natural condition, untarnished by fears and desires, and the thoughts they create.
When everything is OK in our world, we feel OK inside; we are at ease.
Or rather, that is the way it should be. Yet, even when our needs are met, and there is no immediate threat or danger, we seldom feel totally at ease.
More often than not, the very opposite is true. Leave us with nothing to do, and we might start feeling bored. If someone upsets us, we can hold a grievance for days, weeks, or even years. Or we may spend hours worrying about situations that might possibly occur, but seldom do.
This is one of the sad jokes about being human. We are so busy worrying whether or not we are going to be at peace in the future, we don’t give ourselves the chance to be at peace in the present.
Given how easily such thoughts spring up, it is easy to assume they must be subdued and controlled. But that approach stems from the very same belief that created them—the belief that we need to be in control of things in order to be happy.
Over my fifty years of teaching meditation, I have found the greatest challenge for students is to let go of control. They can’t quite believe that they really don’t need to try at all. Sometimes, even the most experienced meditators, with years of practice, may still put a slight effort into their practice. Once they let go completely, they begin to appreciate how effortless it can be, and find themselves dropping more readily into the peace of a quiet mind.
Recently, I’ve been exploring ways to weed out and dissolve even the subtlest levels of wanting, effort, and expectation in meditation. These new approaches have received an enthusiastic response from both complete beginners and people with many years of practice. Encouraged by this, I am now putting them all together in a new book, How to Meditate Without Even Trying, to be published in late March.
Some of you may recognize this as the title of my online meditation course, and it was initially conceived of as handbook for that course, But the more I worked on it, the more tips and fine-tunings I wanted to include, transforming it into a much more comprehensive book.
If you would like to read an advance copy, you can join the “launch team.” My publisher, New World Library, has offered to send anyone who pre-orders it on Amazon in the coming days an advance PDF copy of the book—on the condition they post a review on Amazon when it is formally published. If you would like to join this team, please email me - peter0@peterussell.com.
Wishing you all the best in the year ahead.
Peter
PeterBot: You can ask me (or rather my personal chatbot) questions about my work and ideas, 24/7, at peterrussell.com/peterbot