[This post was taken from a response that I left a fellow member of the Dharma Overground. He posted a long explanation of his current practice, in which he is modulating between meditation and not-meditating during his sitting sessions. His reasoning is connected with parallels in training that he draws from physical training, and his descriptions were very sincere. Even so, I mostly disagreed with his assumptions and did my best to lay out my reasoning, which I thought would be interesting to share here. For a more in-depth understanding of what he was saying, please feel free to check out the original thread.]
Thanks for your post. I found your approach very interesting, and appreciated the methodicalness and precision of your experimentation. Bravo on that.
Also, assuming that you are sharing this to get feedback from other practitioners who have also conducted the “experiment of meditation”, so as to consider alternative perspectives and to perhaps fine-tune your own approach I offer the following for you consideration.
First, I think it’s an interesting parallel that you draw between fitness training and meditation. There certainly do seem to be many parallels here, and having been an athlete and completed several intensive periods of training (I’m currently in the midst of a 14-week strength training program that is quite rigorous) I thought I might take your points and dissect them a little further.
The parallel you seem to be making between over-training the body, and over-training through formal meditation practice seems good-and-well on the surface, but I would question this metaphor as these are categorically different areas of the training. Training attention is very different from training the physical body, as it has very different characteristics and qualities. That being said, I do think we could keep the over-training distinction, but instead should frame it in this way: Instead of seeing training the mind in terms of meditating vs. not-meditating, where if you meditate too much you will over-train, I would frame it instead in terms of “right effort”.
Having sat for as little as 30 minutes a day, and as much as 12 hours a day for months on end, I’ve found that insight and concentration are developed most effectively not by trying to modulate between meditating and not meditating (as clearly on a retreat one is meditating the entire time, nearly non-stop), but rather by modulating one’s amount of effort in practice. The over-training dichotomy then becomes laxity vs. over efforting. For example, when I am on retreat–or sitting in practice–I have a clear intention to remain mindful throughout that period. I never try and cultivate non-mindfulness (though one can’t be perfectly mindful, obviously), but instead try and notice when there is too much effort (in which case I relax) or when there is too little effort (in which case I wratchet up the interest and energy). I have over-efforted during practice before and it did lead to a kind of over-training where I felt completely zonked out, tight, and there didn’t seem to be much value in that practice. Then when I quit practicing and released the effort a bit I did find that there seemed to be progress. But I wouldn’t attribute that to meditating vs. not meditating but rather to not yet knowing how to modulate my effort through mindfulness.
You see, mindfulness–as is seen in the fantastic teachings on the seven factors of enlightenment–can never be over-developed as it is always working to balance out the other 6 factors (the 3 tranquilizing factors and the 3 energizing factors). The other 6 factors however can be over or under developed and so with those we must watch out how they are balanced. The great thing though is that mindfulness of whatever is occuring just naturally leads to the missing factor being strengthened. When our mind is dull and we’re mindful of it, the mind is inclining towards clarity. When the mind is over-energized and we are aware of it, we are holding it all in a wider space and can thus relax.
The danger of the approach that you mention, seems to me, to be that you could be intentionally cultivating non-mindfulness and undermining the powerful continuity of attention which brings about great depths of concentration and insight. Since you’ve read Daniel’s book I assume you’ve seen what a huge emphasis he puts on continuity, and how strongly he correlates continuous, strong practice with the developments of insight that each of us (presumably) are here to develop. I’ve certainly found this to be the case, and have seen with pretty much every meditation practice I’ve undertaken (insight, concentration, metta, etc.) that continuity is always stressed and for good reason.
That being said, I am quite open to being proven wrong on this point or to at least re-evaluating the importance of continuity of mindfulness in practice.
all the best,
-Vince H.
