Reflecting on motivation in meditation practice

or "How I learned to stop worrying and love Samsara"

I think this is a difficult topic to discuss but it’s necessary to say something about it, to clarify for myself why I do what I do, and also to attempt to inspire introspection in others on this important topic.

Also, by way of disclaimer: Meditation is not just one thing. Every person’s practice is unique. For the most part, though, in this essay the form of meditation I’m referencing is the one labeled in the West as Mindfulness. It’s a style of meditation that emphasizes focusing attention on the basis of conscious experience. Other forms of meditation have different principles and functions and their effects might not be well-described by what I’m writing about here.

Meditation is time consuming and also tends to demand a high level of engagement with it even when off the cushion. For many practicioners it becomes a hobby, by which I mean the object of substantial voluntary effort and enthusiasm. It’s something of a hobby for me anyway. Why do I do it? Why do I care? Why should you do it? Why should you care?

In order to focus this discussion a little bit I’ll limit myself to examining just three categories of motivation, though there are certainly others, and my treatment here is not intended to be comprehensive. It’s really just scratching the surface.

Performance Enhancement

A very prominently “advertised” benefit of meditation is the improvement of one’s ability to perceive the world more clearly, and to focus the mind towards intentional engagement rather than reactivity or distraction.

Advertised by whom?

These potential benefits are often given as reasons to practice meditation by people who’s own lives are heavily oriented around performance in a social context (usually a career job) that demands that they perform at a high level. This is especially the case amongst the sub-culture of U.S. based technology companies (and this is the sub-culture that my career resides in).

Is it true that meditation improves perception?

In my experience, a little bit true, but somewhat unevenly. Meditation practice does tend to clarify perception in a durable way, such that after several years of consistent high-quality meditation practice, one’s relationship to perception does change, and the most noticeable change (to me) has been a relaxing away from the belief that everything perceived is being perceiving “correctly”. In other words, the practicioner tends to gain the ability to notice the impact of conditioning on perception and can therefore distinguish between highly conditioned perception vs. “primordial” perception. Noticing highly conditioned perception might have performance benefits. It might improve one’s ability to notice when another person is trying to manipulate or condition your perception. It certainly does improve one’s ability to notice when the person doing the manipulating or conditioning is your own self.

Is it true that meditation improves focus?

Yes, in a limited sense. I have certainly noticed a decrease in my own reactivity and more space available to choose my behavior. I have not noticed a significant change in my ability to force myself to do things I don’t want to do. I have not noticed a significant change in my ability to hyper-focus on specific productive/creative tasks. Being less reactive has some impact on discipline and focus in the sense that one is able to slow down and be more deliberate and intentional about behavior. If the problem is that you’re constantly whiplashed between reactive states, then having fewer of those should benefit discipline and focus indirectly. If you’re not already highly reactive, then I’m not sure if meditation improves discipline and focus above and beyond what you would already be capable of when not distracted by reactivity.

Is this one of my motivations?

It used to be, but my relationship to it has changed a lot over the years. When I started meditating (10 years ago) this was a very important motivation. Today it isn’t. It has gradually decreased in importance over time. I have genuinely become less reactive in a durable way. This has not resulted in me becoming super productive at work or anything else that might count as performance enhancement in a material sense.

Improvement of the felt sense of Well-Being

I started meditating originally after reading about the possible mental health benefits of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction. I was in a very deep pit of depression and anxiety at the time and was desperate for relief. In past years I had attempted to find relief through anti-depressant medication (SSRI drugs) and found that they were worse than ineffective. Not only did I experience the usual side effects (damaged libido, lowered metabolism/weight-gain) I also experienced a profound reduction in my emotional empathy for both myself and other people.

Aside: I genuinely wonder if this reduction of empathy is the mechanism through which the anti-depressant effect actually works. If you stop empathizing with yourself you will just not feel your own negative emotions very much. If you stop empathizing with other people you will tend not to feel anxious about your interactions with other people. They will tend to seem more like cardboard cutouts than real people with inner lives.

Does meditation reduce one’s experience of depression and anxiety?

In my experience, Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction has approximately no effect at all. I think that improvements in affect/mood due to beginning a meditation practice can be more parsimoniously explained by the basic effect of simply slowing down and making space to feel your feelings. I don’t think meditation specifically matters here. One could probably gain the same benefit from spending 30 minutes each morning going for a walk or cleaning your house. Any kind of interruption from attempting to forcefully shut down rumination should do it.

Mindfulness meditation can, perversely, be an opportunity for more rumination to occur. It’s certainly possible to ruminate about whether or not one is meditating properly. I used to experience this very intensely, though it has thankfully relented as my practice has matured and I’ve gained more experience. I think the dynamic here is the “don’t think about a pink elephant” effect. If you approach Mindfulness with a highly goal-oriented, outcome based attitude you will tend to judge it in a similar manner with which you might judge the effect of a psychiatric medication. This is counter-productive at best and potentially harmful under some circumstances.

That said, there is an opportunity for improvement in the sense of well-being due to the durable effects of meditation practice. Being less reactive tends to dramatically reduce the number of triggering incidents one experiences in daily life, which amounts to a reduction of stressors overall. Being more aware of the impact of conditioning on one’s perception tends to make one less susceptible to certain forms of manipulation that produce a sense of un-wellness. In particular, attempts at deceit become more transparent, and therefore less of a threat. Feeling less threatened ought to reduce anxiety by a meaningful amount.

Morality, Virtue, and Attainment

In the traditional religious/spiritual context that Mindfulness meditation arose in (traditional Asian Buddhism), these motivations are very prominent and are also downstream of a a traditional metaphysics related to reincarnation, karma, merit, etc. Under traditional metaphysics one of the most important motivations for meditation is to improve one’s metaphysical status, including ultimately the acquisition of certain attainments and promises that those attainments result in supernatural abilities (siddhis) or even “liberation” (an escape from a metaphysical trap). This was never my motivation so I’m only noting it here for contrast.

However, quite a lot of this motivation does seem to manifest in Western culture absent the metaphysics of traditional Asian societies. Instead, there seems to be an interaction with the implicit “psycho-physics” of the sub-culture I am a part of (a coinage, intended to mean approximately the same thing as metaphysics but in the context of a society that centers psychology rather than spirituality/religion). Western psycho-physics is obsessed with the question of “am I good enough?” where goodness is defined very super-egoically. Social status, relationship satisfaction, material success, etc.

How is meditation related to self-worth?

For many meditators, meditation is another vehicle to prove one’s worth. Being good at meditating is praise-worthy (in some sub-cultures), and it can in some cases be viewed competitively. I had a phase where I was somewhat preoccupied with this. I wondered if I was a good enough meditator. I wondered how I stacked up compared to other meditators. I felt guilt and shame when I didn’t practice long enough or hard enough. It became quite toxic and I had to seriously realign my perspective to get out of the toxicity of it. It IS NOT a competition. You don’t have to measure yourself (how would you?) or compare yourself to others. Easy to say, hard to do. We’re so deeply conditioned to measure and compare in almost every dimension of our lives. Trying to learn a new skill without measuring and comparing is very unfamiliar to many people. It took me years of practice to feel secure enough to just drop this toxic impulse.

Some meditators seem to have hopes for moral improvement related to the durable effects of meditation. The drive for improved self-worth is closely related to this, as morality is an important aspect of feeling good about yourself. It’s hard to feel good about yourself if you think you’re a moral failure. This often manifests as extreme scrupulosity. It’s incredibly common to find meditators that are very very very concerned with things like progressive political activism (especially related to social justice issues). It’s incredibly common to find meditators that are very very very concerned with activism about global climate change. It’s also common to find meditators who have chosen a Vegan diet for themselves (and are eager to try and persuade you to do the same). These particular foci of scrupulosity are culturally conditioned. The sub-culture of Western meditators is highly concentrated around the politics and cultural mores of the left wing of American society (n.b. the American left wing is actually a center of the spectrum political culture in global historical terms). I suspect a different sub-culture of meditators would have a different set of foci.

How is scrupulosity related to meditation?

In principle it isn’t. In practice, it is often a vehicle for people to form social groups with a similar set of political and cultural concerns. In this sense, meditation groups are playing the same role that Church groups play in the right wing/Christian sub-cultures in the West.

Additionally, there does seem to be an implicit belief among many Western meditators that training one’s perception ought to result in a seeing more clearly the urgent problems of the world. This probably does happen to some extent. The problems are not very well concealed but it is possible to blind yourself to them by succumbing to distraction and conditioning. Being less distracted and less conditioned does tend to make obvious things actually show up in your awareness where you had previously been blinding yourself to them.

There’s probably also a selection bias effect. Highly scrupulous people in the sub-culture are more likely to be meditators. Meditation does not necessarily make one more scrupulous.

Finally, this scrupulosity is something of a hindrance for actually doing meditation in an effective and sustainable way. It tends to create a new set of distractions and conditionings that will replace the ones being let go of. Kinda tricky to manage, actually.

If meditation improves your awareness of real moral problems, shouldn’t it also improve your moral behavior?

No. Why would it? It does, however, give you more space and freedom to choose behavior that is more aligned with your own morality. You still have to make that choice and act upon it though. That behavior is often deeply constrained by circumstances. Even if it’s not deeply constrained by circumstances, the awareness of more choices does not necessarily increase the weighting given to any one of those choices. In some situations it can actually lead to a kind of paralysis, where having too few constraints and too many choices leads to an inability to decide. Constraints can be highly productive sometimes.

What are my own motivations in this dimension?

I think I have never been highly motivated by scrupulosity. I have experienced a desire to spend time socializing with other meditators though. It’s a hobby. A shared interest. A guidepost for sub-cultural compatibility.

As I’ve matured and improved at meditation, my sense of self-worth has shifted away from super-egoically constructed modes and towards “basic okayness” (a rough translation of kadag), meaning that spending time in my own unconditioned awareness loosens my grip on any feeling of needing to prove myself to anyone (including to myself). Ironically, this has been the source of the biggest improvement to my sense of well-being, not any marked reduction in my experience of depressed or anxious moods. I still feel those moods. They simply don’t impact my sense of self-worth or well-being the way they used to. They’re certainly unpleasant, but they’re not condemnations to suffer, just passing phenomena like anything else.

Experiencing my own basic okayness has been medicinal in this respect, but it’s not a “cure” so to speak. I’m still pretty neurotic and I probably always will be. I’m simply able to relate to myself differently now. It has tended to remove the question of self-worth from my concerns. My motivation to meditate is not to prove myself worthy, to demonstrate my moral goodness, or to compete with other meditators. It’s mostly just to experience my own basic okayness and make space for the joyful experience of being in the world just as it is.