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Meditating for 20 minutes in the morning and expecting it to carry you through the rest of your day is like zapping the clouds out of the sky and expecting that no more will appear.
I must’ve spent over 100 hours speaking with my Buddhist teacher on this key point. But even he—someone who lived as a monk for 8 years—couldn’t have given me the perspective I really needed.
For that, I needed a fusion of understandings:
- Hundreds of different spiritual teachings
- Thousands of hours of discussion with my neuropsychologist wife
- 4 years of formal study in educational theory and personal development
…And, of course, a shit-ton of suffering.
Here’s the problem with formal meditation sessions: they begin and end. And when they end, if you’re like I was then you might enjoy a brief ‘afterglow’ but, inevitably, that fades.
Now, there are many kinds of meditation. But for simplicity, we’re going to consider the two most practiced categories across meditating cultures:
1. Concentration
2. Insight
Concentration practice involves focusing attention on the breath or some other ‘meditation object’, and returning to it when you notice you’re distracted. The result of this practice is not only increased concentration, but also self-awareness, memory, learning, and emotional regulation.
There’s a lot of robust science proving that concentration practices create positive changes in the brain, and if your goal is only to improve certain qualities then you may be able to satisfy that goal meditating just 20 minutes per day.
I had a more ambitious goal. My goal was full-blown Awakening, and for that, I needed insight practices.
Why? Because concentration practices alone are rarely, if ever, enough to bring about full recognition of one’s true nature and the subsequent liberation from dissatisfaction. That said, it’s very important to acknowledge that concentration practices are often necessary as provisional means of preparing oneself for insight practices. Put simply, if the mind-stream is like a wailing chimpanzee 24/7 then the first thing to do is give it a banana.
In insight practices, we observe and investigate phenomena to see them as they are (as opposed to how we interpret them to be). Sometimes we use deliberate techniques like a body scan; other times we just follow our curiosity. For the purpose of this demonstration, I include practices associated with nondual teachings—such as self-inquiry—as insight practices (because they aim to bring about insight).
Here’s the key point: if meditative stability and insight were things we had to develop, like muscle, then it would make sense to meditate in the same way as we go to the gym. Many teachers and teachings promote this approach, and they do so for one of two reasons:
1. They’re still engaged in dualistic thinking themselves, believing that enlightenment is a thing that can be achieved by a person in the future.
2. They understand that dissolving that dualistic thinking is difficult for one who is immersed in it, and so they give developmental practices as provisional recommendations—recommendations that are to be replaced later as the student’s understanding becomes more sophisticated.
I’ve given at least one of these provisional recommendations on this channel. Check out my video, If you can’t focus for 5 minutes, watch this…
But here’s the thing: ultimately, meditative stability and insight are not things you have to develop or acquire. It’s not even possible to develop or acquire them. Because they’re not things you gain. Rather, they’re things you are.
It all comes down to recognizing your true nature. As long as you think your body and mind are your true identity, you’ll be stuck in an endless loop of trying to make them more like this and less like that. But consider how few people you know—even among spiritual practitioners—who have said ‘I’ve finally changed myself enough: I’m content with my body, I’m content with my mind’?
Of course, even if they did say that, they’d be in a precarious position—because the body and the mind are subject to change. And this is why, to recognize true peace, we must recognize ourselves to be that which transcends change: the aware space in which all change occurs; the aware space that is unaffected, unharmed by anything within it.
This awareness, your true nature, is—and always has been—perfectly lucid. It perceives everything with the sharpest clarity, without requiring any training to do so. And it knows everything exactly as it is, without interpretation, judgment, bias, label or description—for each of these is, itself, just another cloud coming and going within the empty sky of awareness.
In this way, you already are perfect concentration; you already are perfect insight. This is what the words ‘enlightenment’ and ‘awakening’ mean: dropping the burden of dualistic thinking and snapping out of the dream it perpetuates.
So, in a way, the title of this video is clickbait! There is no ‘how to’ when it comes to meditating 24/7 because it’s not something you do. But I trust that if you’ve made it this far then you’re pleased that I lured you into my trap!
The only ‘practice’ that makes sense in light of all I’ve shared here is most eloquently phrased in the Tibetan nondual teachings: rest naturally, in an uncontrived way, without seeking or describing anything—just for a brief moment… and another… and another.
If you find that instruction inaccessible—if your mind is like that noisy chimpanzee—then please enjoy a more formal kind of practice for the time being. In other words, give that chimpanzee a banana. But always in the context of using that practice to gain evidence that it’s okay to let go and relax into natural meditative stability; natural knowing of things just as they are.
With love from my desk,
dg💙
P.S. Want to find out where you're at in your mindfulness journey? Take my 1-minute quiz.
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