The Anxiety of Choosing the Right Practice
La ansiedad de elegir la práctica correcta
A student reflects on having abandoned an intensive meditation practice after encountering non-dual teachings, and wonders whether that shift was genuine growth or avoidance. The teacher explores the deeper pattern of needing to know whether one is doing the right thing.
The Anxiety of Choosing the Right Practice
A student reflects on having abandoned an intensive meditation practice after encountering non-dual teachings, and wonders whether that shift was genuine growth or avoidance. The teacher explores the deeper pattern of needing to know whether one is doing the right thing.
I thought I'd use this time to zero in on something about focusing practice. I spent over a year doing it quite intensively, and it felt so right. Then when I got into non-duality teachings, studying with teachers and so on, the focusing just fell by the wayside.
Now that I'm talking about it, maybe it connects to this whole question of doing versus being. After a while it felt like I was doing it, and maybe that's what shifted. Perhaps this happens to people all the time: you reach a certain stage and say, "Wait, I'm not going about this right," and you step back.
But then, how do I know where this impulse is coming from? Only I can know. Is it avoidance that I didn't continue with it?
When you say "continue with it," you're referring to…
Yes, putting aside time to sit and focus on the "I am." My path started unfolding so beautifully when I was taking that time. Then I stopped, and it continued to unfold. But every time I'd go back to it, it felt like a separate "me" doing the practice, so I'd step back again. I'd dance back and forth with it. Now I'll take a little bit of time here and there during the day, but I never returned to it in such an intensive way. I don't know what to make of it, but I thought I'd share that with you.
Do you want me to share any thoughts on that?
I'd love that. Please, go ahead.
The certainty of knowing is itself the problem
This is a really key, deep question: the sense of "Am I doing the right thing?" The best answer that comes to me is that any sense of certainty about whether you're doing the right thing or not is itself the wrong sense. The knowing, the certainty around it, is where the trouble lies. So having the question, even the anxiety, "Am I doing the right thing or not?" is actually good.
Most people, most of the time, operate from a lower stage of development in which they know what is right, know what is wrong. That is where a lot of mistakes come from.
When you made this shift from one kind of spiritual approach to another, you probably had a sense of, "I'm done with that. That's not the right thing anymore. This is the right thing." And that's fine as a feeling. But when that feeling hardens into a knowing (that was the wrong thing, this is the right thing), then it's going to cause trouble. There's a sense of control, a sense of knowing, an exclusion of a whole way of relating to life. You throw the baby out with the bathwater.
The pattern of serial seeking
Usually, when we try to figure out the right way as a formula, something is happening at a deeper, subtler level that we're trying to control and get away from. Being able to explore different things is good, of course. But one can become a kind of serial monogamist: constantly moving from one thing to another, from one relationship to another, because you've "finally found the right thing." Then it no longer sustains itself as the right thing, so you find the next right thing. To see that clearly is to recognize a pattern.
That's the way in which you've bought into the story of the one who knows, who is telling you what the right thing is. And that voice, the one telling you what the right thing is, is responding to something you don't want to sit with.
What I'm hearing is that it keeps coming back to the present moment, again and again.
Uncertainty as the ground
Yes. And the present moment includes contemplating the past and the future, making choices, the anxiety around those choices, and the inherent risk and uncertainty involved. But if the sense is, "I've got this. I know how this is. I'm making the right choices," then you've bought into the mental story. Only the mind can tell a story like that. Only the mind can declare that black is the way and white is not, or up and not down, or left and not right.
I'm not saying that a formal meditation time every day is the right thing or the wrong thing. It's neither and both, depending on when. And who knows when it's right? Nobody knows.
Improvisation as a way of living
That's why the metaphor of musical improvisation is useful. In improvisation, you can never know whether the right note to play next is this one. You can never be sure the one you're playing now is right, or that the one you played a moment ago destroyed the harmony. You can have a sense. You can be loving it. But sometimes you're loving it and it's not that great. Sometimes you're hating it and it's amazing. You cannot know.
And yet you can get better and better, because you're going deeper, attuning more, developing more skills, learning. Then you start tapping into a deeper joy: "I love doing this. I love life. I love playing."
The move from musical improvisation to life, though, is a whole other level of difficulty and challenge. Life involves life and death, the terrors of inevitability.
Yes.
Watching the motive
It really comes down to the energy going into it. You can't know whether it's the right thing or not. But if there is a deep sense of something missing, and you're hoping to get it through this or that practice, there's a risk. That impulse is just going to amplify the part that is, let's say, a neurosis around "something's missing and I need to get it out there."
Or perhaps you are now touching deeper parts of yourself that bring anxiety, everything you weren't able to sit with in the past, and now it's become a little too hot.
I would suggest contemplating both of those possibilities. Look at what the motive is, because the choices involved (changing habits, committing to something new, requiring sustained energy for many days in a row) are quite significant.