Mindfulness meditation is a method for developing neutral, non-judgmental, objective self-awareness. This is called, “Meta-awareness,” which means being aware of your awareness.
Instead of just thinking or feeling something, you simultaneously observe yourself having this thought or feeling, and you’re able to comment on it. “Oh, look at the way I’m thinking about this,” or “Whoa, I’m caught in this feeling again. I wonder why?” or “I notice that mood creeping in again.” You’re in the experience, and simultaneously outside it.
This is different from our usual state of awareness, in which we tend to be lost in the flow of our experiences without much self-observation. We swim in the sea of our own perceptions and can’t quite see ourselves because we’re so identified with them. It’s like trying to see your own eyes.
The term, “meta-cognition,” which means the ability to think about your thoughts, is the same as meta-awareness but extends to all your senses—seeing, feeling, hearing, moving, as well as complex channels of perception like relationships. The ability to stand separate and apart from your experiences, observe, and comment on them as they’re happening is a radically different way of living than just being in feelings, moods, thoughts, reactions, and so on. It frees you from the shackles of your own mind and gives you more choice in how you respond to things.
Doing mindfulness meditation for just 10-20 minutes per day can help you get a handle on your thoughts, emotions, cravings, and reactions, which, in turn, can help you manage and reduce anxiety and depression, improve concentration, manage stress, lower blood pressure, increase your compassion for people, and make you feel more calm and centered.
However, learning mindfulness is only the very first step in working on yourself. It’s a basic awareness tool for processing what’s going on in your life. It’s like learning the notes on the guitar; knowing them gives you the basic tools for processing music. But this alone doesn’t enable you to actually play music; to do that, you need to learn more things—scales, chords, rhythms, etc. Similarly, mindfulness practice is an essential method for being aware, but it’s not a method in itself for solving your problems.
I’ve done mindfulness meditation for many years during which time I also spent working with a number of clients who were long-term, highly experienced meditation teachers. My observations of my own experiences, and those of these clients is that while this practice can help you gain a certain degree of calmness, composure, self-control, and even tranquility, it doesn’t actually facilitate transformation of a problem. It makes you feel better in the moment and brings some sanity to your life so you can deal with things better but it doesn’t enable you to uncover and integrate the meaning and purpose of your life issues. It’s more of a palliative than a change agent.
Some meditation practitioners would disagree, claiming that their practice has led to transformative experiences, and this is certainly true. But these experiences only transform your relationship to a problem, not the problem itself. These are two different things. Changing your relationship to a problem does influence it, but only minorly. You become a bit less bothered by it. But to truly transform a difficult issue you have to process it in order to discover what it’s trying to wake you up about. You must also work on your fears and blocks to making the changes being asked of you.
Doing this requires patience, perseverance, and a bit of courage. People tend to want a quick fix, an immediate mood change, or even the euphoric experience of non-attachment. The term, “spiritual bypass,” was coined a number of years ago to describe this use of mindfulness practice as a way of avoiding problems. If you do mindfulness meditation as your sole method for dealing with your troubles, you’re probably doing this to some extent. You meditate, feel a bit better, then feel worse, and meditate again, and so on. It doesn’t go further than this.
The core difference between mindfulness as a problem-solving method in itself and processing your problems is that mindfulness practice views your troubles as something “wrong,” and claims that the solution is to get a better relationship to them, detach from them, and try to transcend them, whereas processing views a them as something right, because they contain meaningful information that aims to spark positive change. A life problem isn’t simply an error, a pathology, a mistake in your life—it’s a change agent, an evolutionary catalyst. It’s your life’s crucible.
One thing I noticed after years of working with these high level meditation teachers is that they suffer from the exact same problems everyone does—depression, anxiety, unresolved emotional wounds, relationship drama, etc. Mindfulness meditation helps them manage these issues and gain some insight into them but it doesn’t connect them with the underlying message, the implicit changes trying to come forth. As I said, it’s more of a way get relief, and not feel so entangled—but it misses the deeper process.
I was incredibly pleased when one of America’s foremost meditation teachers, Jack Kornfield, wrote an article several years ago, conveying the importance of psychotherapy in spiritual practice. He noted, correctly, that the deepest mediation practice, done by the most experienced practitioner, does not hit the places that psychotherapy can.
Of course, he didn’t specify what kind of psychotherapy he meant—and it does make a difference—but he nailed a really important point, namely, that when you meditate, what comes into your awareness is mostly what’s already in your conscious mind, or just below the surface. It’s in the realm of what’s already known to you. But it doesn’t help you connect with your deeper, unconscious processes because they don’t come into your awareness.
This is because the whole purpose of mindfulness practice is to distance yourself from the contents of your psyche, not engage with them. Getting distance is an important first step because it makes you feel less overwhelmed and gives you some perspective on what’s going on. But if that’s all you do, you avoid your process; you don’t connect with the underlying meaning of your issues. You climb out of the swamp to some extent, and step on to dry land but the swamp is still there. It influences your life in ways you can’t see, and it fuels your problems.
If you do mindfulness meditation every day you’ll be able to take the edge off your problems but if you think about it, this is very similar to taking a pill to feel better. Of course, it’s healthier but it’s based on the same concept. It approaches your troubles as being wrong, meaningless, and purposeless. Meditating is sort of a way to try to get divorced from them. This is totally understandable; we all want to feel better. But just feeling better isn’t always the most effective approach in the long run. You miss out on the powerful, transformative growth that your problems are trying to connect you with. Your difficulties aren’t just something to get distance from or transcend; they’re trying to change you in incredibly positive, uplifting, empowering ways.
So, why doesn’t mindfulness meditation incorporate processing methods? Why does it focus exclusively on self-observation? The notion of intervening in your problems as opposed to just observing them or praying to a higher power to change them is a relatively new idea. It comes from psychology, which is only about 140 years old. Mindfulness practice is derived from Eastern spiritual practices—Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism— that predate psychology by thousands of years.
The originators never had the benefit of psychology. The idea that our problems are malleable and can be changed through our own interventions is a paradigm shift from thousands of years of believing that our troubles are controlled by either an external power or in the case of mindfulness practice, that they’re caused by a pathological neurosis of the mind which isn’t something you should engage with.
For example, in Buddhism, they say the self, the soul, and your problems are all an illusion you should learn to see through and detach from. The notion of observing, detaching, and transcending makes sense if you have no psychology paradigm. But it’s an incomplete understanding of the human condition because it misses the fact that problems are directive, purposeful, and aim at specific changes we need to make.
So, while reverence toward ancient spiritual practices is important, it’s equally important to acknowledge how they need updating, changing, and expanding. Human inquiry continues on unabated and brings us ever increasing awareness and knowledge. Don’t get stuck on something just because it’s ancient.” In fact, this a good reason to not get stuck on it and look for what’s missing. We’re learners and grower and nothing will ever stop us.
We now have the enormous benefit of understanding the subconscious mind, and we have tools for processing it. We’ve studied behavior, cognition, development, personality, social processes, biology, relationships, etc., and while a lot of what psychologists tell us about these things is nonsense, just the fact that we’ve identified so many aspects of human functioning and are interested in how it works puts us ahead of where we were before the advent of psychology. Human consciousness increases over time. If you rely solely on practices created by folks 5000 years ago, you overlook what humans have been figuring out since then.
We don’t do medicine, transportation, agriculture, or govern ourselves like we did 5000 years ago, so, why would we rely exclusively on an ancient spiritual system? Spiritual systems are generated by the deepest layers of the psyche and filtered through the mindset of people of a specific era. This is why, for example, modern Christianity has very little in common with Medieval Christianity. As people evolve, so do their spiritual systems. It’s the same in Eastern religions—not necessarily in the East itself—but in the West, where we’ve begged, borrowed, and stole what we want and combined it with our own knowledge. Psychology is our major contribution.
So, learn and practice mindfulness meditation. It will do your life wonders. But don’t use it as your sole method of personal growth. Use it as your fundamental self-awareness tool. Once you’ve got the hang of it, you’re ready to shine the light of your meta-communicator on your problems and intervene in them. This involves identifying your perceptions in various sensory channels (vision, audition, proprioception, kinesthesia, relationships, and the world), amplifying these perceptions, and processing them to completion. The result is true transformation and growth rather than self-imposed equanimity based on bypassing existing problems. If you want to learn how to do this, listen to my podcast, The Dr. Zwig Show.
