For many years I relied exclusively on a single technique of meditation: the noting method of vipassana. It’s a simple technique that I learned from one of my teachers, and was originally devised by a Burmese monk named Mahasi Sayadaw. In this technique you use a mental note (or label) to describe whatever it is that you’re experiencing in that moment. The notes might include things like, “thinking, itching, pressure, sadness, openness, pain, seeing, hearing”, etc. They are used to briefly describe the subjective experience so that one can directly know, with mindful attention, what is being experienced. In that sense they are just an aid in directly perceiving what is present. By doing so one can begin to see what in Theravada Buddhism are called the three characteristics of experience: impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and selflessness.
My understanding at the time was if I saw these three characteristics of experience deeply enough then I would achieve enlightenment. And so I practiced a technique that would help me do that, so I could move toward my goal. And there’s something quite beautiful about this approach. It has a type of simplicity, straight-forwardness, and pragmatism that is really attractive. If you do this, then you’ll see this, and if you see this, then you’ll get this. If A then B. If B then C, where C is enlightenment. Cool, let’s do it! But what I’ve come to realize in the past couple years is that it isn’t always that simple.
I eventually quit doing the noting technique exclusively, and begin doing all sorts of other meditative techniques. I practiced metta meditation, zazen, choiceless awareness, self-inquiry, and explored the concentration absorptions. I tried many different kinds of techniques and saw that they were each different. They all had certain strengths and weaknesses and they all opened me up to different facets of experience.
But even more interesting is that I’ve also found that I now care much less about technique, and often just find myself sitting down (or not even sitting per se) and simply trusting myself to know how to meditate. I trust my mind and my heart to open to experience, to be with what is, and to explore the ebb and flow of the inner world. I don’t necessarily even employ a technique while doing this, I just drop the sense of trying to do anything in particular and let things happen. Some might call this choiceless awareness, but even that feels like too much, because it’s always different, always changing, and always fresh. How can I possibly describe something like that in a simple phrase or teach someone how to do that, when it has take me nearly a decade to discover it myself? Perhaps this is something that goes beyond technique.
And now that I’m in this kind of natural meditation more and more, whether I’m sitting or not, it doesn’t feel right to tell people that the way to get here is through techniques alone. Surely, that has been an important part of my journey, and I teach techniques, but letting go of rigid ideas about what meditation “should be” or “is” has been equally important. When what is unnecessarily or unnatural have been dropped, what is natural and fundamental are revealed in their wake. This is maturity. This is trusting deeply that what we do and who we are aren’t separated in the least.
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