Are We Really Meditating?
Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel examines
common misconceptions about Buddhist
practice that can derail even
the most seasoned practitioners.
W hat is meditation practice? When are
we genuinely practicing and when are
we just going through the motions,
caught in unexamined assumptions about prac-
tice? I often ask myself these questions so I don’t
succumb to spiritual vagueness and because I
want my practice to continue to grow.
The purpose of meditation is to develop a
sane relationship to experience. The struggles
we have in life—shutting down, pushing away,
feeling overwhelmed, and all the neurotic attach-
ment—arise from the confusion we harbor about
how to relate to the rich energy of the mind.
When eating, we ingest, process, and eliminate
food. But how do we digest our experience? It’s
not so clear.
As meditators we look at the mind and its
activity. When we begin to practice, we often
feel surprised: “I didn’t realize my mind was so
wild and unruly!” Even experienced practitioners
will complain, “I have been practicing for thirty
years, but my mind is still crazy!” We often view
experience as a problem. So how do we work
with it? Is there a way to enjoy the activity of
58 buddhadharma: the practitioner’s quarterly spring 2013
mind? How does practice bring us into a healthy
relationship with our world? Meditation puts
these questions front and center.
Methods alone are
not the practice
We think of meditation as the act of sitting in the
lotus position, reciting a mantra, visualizing, or
focusing on the breath. These skillful methods
help us navigate our world. They keep our bodies
upright and our energy flowing, and more impor-
tant, they can help guide us away from habitual
tendencies.
Sometimes, just following the meditation tech-
nique will lead to a moment of clarity, when we
experience a sense of liberation. I don’t mean
“LIBERATION!!!” in some highfalutin kind of
way. I just mean that we may enjoy a moment
in which the mind stops trying to fix or push at
things, allowing us to open into a larger way of
being.
And yet we know that we can sometimes apply
practice techniques without really “practicing”
photography liza matthews
at all. In those moments, such methods don’t
touch our habitual tendencies and we find our-
selves defaulting to our usual ways of relating to
the mind, such as getting lost in the momentum
of thoughts and emotions or in rejecting them.
We may spend a lot of time wishing we were
someone else, somewhere else having a different
experience. We may find ourselves wanting or
not wanting, grasping or rejecting, even as we
sit on the cushion.
The various tools of meditation practice can
put us into a purposeful stronghold. When we
place our body in a meditation posture, recite
a mantra, or follow the breath, we provide our-
selves with a supportive structure in which to
view the mind and its distractions. We often for-
get that this “seeing” is a powerful and necessary
realization in and of itself. In fact, it is the start-
ing point for our path.
Sometimes, however, rather than appreciating
our discoveries along the path, we brace against
them and our experience. When this happens we
miss the genius of the practice methods, which are
designed to bring us into a sane relationship with
our experience. As the great Tibetan Buddhist
master Tilopa said to his disciple Naropa, “Son,
it is not experiences themselves that bind you,
but the way you cling to and reject them.”
We may be reciting prayers, sitting erect, or
watching the breath, but are we actually work-
ing with our minds? Is our practice touching and
transforming our habitual tendencies of grasp-
ing and rejection? These questions about how
we apply the practice moment to moment are
deeply personal. We need to continually ask
them, because if we think meditating means just
applying a technique, we may never experience
the liberation that genuine practice can bring.
Eventually we may conclude that practice doesn’t
work, that we’ve wasted our time, and that we’re
going to return to the real world. It happens.
Toughing it out
We’re told that the great yogis of the past, includ-
ing Milarepa, Yeshe Tsogyal, and Bodhidharma,
spent years practicing austerities, such as sit-
ting naked on snowy mountaintops and cutting
spring 2013 buddhadharma: the practitioner’s quarterly 59

Elizabeth Mattis-
Namgyel has studied and
practiced the dharma for
nearly three decades under
the guidance of her teacher
and husband, Dzigar Kongtrul
Rinpoche. She spent six years
in solitary retreat and now
serves as retreat master of
Samten Ling in Crestone,
Colorado. She is the author
of The Power of an Open
Question (Shambhala).
60 buddhadharma: the practitioner’s quarterly
off their eyelids so they wouldn’t fall asleep in
meditation.
As we practitioners struggle with our expe-
rience, we may begin to associate meditation
with suffering. We may even view this struggle
as purifying karma, assuming that unless we
are uncomfortable, we are not really practicing.
When we hold fast to such notions of practice,
our suffering grows ever more real along with
the “not-wanting” we feel toward the unpleas-
antness of it all.
The Buddha, in his very first teaching, said,
“There is suffering.” Sometimes we mistakenly
interpret this to mean that we are doomed to suf-
fer. I take the Buddha’s words as an invitation to
practice nonviolence toward my inner and outer
worlds. In this simple but powerful statement,
the Buddha suggests that suffering is not some-
thing we can fix, ignore, or get rid of. Rather, he
is intimating that practice provides the ability to
make ourselves big enough to include both the
pain and beauty of the human condition—not
only our own but also that of others.
Our ability to bear witness to suffering with-
out pushing it away or getting overwhelmed is
linked to liberation. What is experience before
we shrink from it, try to subdue it, or manipulate
it? This is the question for practitioners.
The move from “I am suffering” to “there is
suffering” allows the pain of the human condi-
tion to touch us and releases our deepest wisdom
and compassion. In this way, the great practitio-
ners of the past have experienced what we might
call suffering as a kind of fierce empowerment.
It’s not like paying taxes
If our practice consists of toughing it out, a time
will come when we feel we have endured enough.
We may decide to give it all up and go danc-
ing—as if practice and enjoyment were at odds.
In his book The Words of My Perfect Teacher,
Patrul Rinpoche says we often practice “as if we
are paying taxes.” We really just want to come
home after work and watch TV, but we feel we
should meditate.
spring 2013
This raises a valuable question: “What is
true enjoyment?” My teacher, Dzigar Kongtrul
Rinpoche, once defined bliss as “the absence of
grasping and rejection.” If this is so, enjoyment
could be a good way to define “practice.”
The purpose of meditation practice is to enjoy
the natural vitality of the mind; practice is not
something we should do out of a sense of duty.
Who are we practicing for? The teacher? Are we
doing this so we won’t go to hell? To be good?
Who is the arbiter of “good,” anyway? The point
of practice is not to be good, but to learn how to
be at ease with our experience and deeply enjoy
our mind and life.
Short passing experiences
Sometimes we meet a teacher, listen to a teaching,
or have an experience—perhaps in nature—that
wakes us up. All of a sudden our habitual mind
stops, and we enjoy a moment of wonder or
openness. Such experiences remind us that there
is life beyond grasping and rejection.
But when we try to hold on to such passing
experiences, we once again find ourselves trans-
ported to the conditional world of preferences
with all its “wants” and “not-wants,” hopes and
fears. This is where we usually live, engaged in
struggle with the world.
There is a saying in the mind training teach-
ings: “Give up all hope of fruition.” People often
interpret this to mean that there is no resting
place for the practitioner. What it actually means
is that when we grasp at positive experiences,
we fall back into ordinary mind. Freedom is just
the opposite. It arises from valuing all experience
and remaining open to life in all its pain and joy.
No physical boundary
When people first enter a retreat, they can have
an awkward or uncomfortable relationship with
the experience of boundaries. Oftentimes they’ll
distract themselves from meditation practice by
Jasmine Pema
trying to communicate with others or they’ll find
“interesting” things to do. Some will withdraw
from experience and try to create a protective
shield through holding themselves in a rigid and
contracted way. These two styles of relating to
experience are once again expressions of grasping
and rejection. They indicate that we don’t know
how to be with our experience in an easy, enjoy-
able, and intelligent way—in a practice way.
During a long-term retreat where a small
group of us practiced in separate cabins on the
same retreat land, I found myself dreading our
occasional group practice sessions and trying
to avoid my fellow retreatants at the water tap.
Whenever someone walked past me, I would feel
my mind and body tighten.
One day I saw someone I didn’t recognize
walking toward me on the path and I jumped
into the bushes. My teacher, who happened to
be standing nearby, playfully teased me, saying,
“That isn’t a dignified way for a practitioner to
act!” I knew he was right.
Having to grapple with my confusion around
boundaries eventually compelled me to ask some
very deep and essential questions about practice:
Where is the true boundary of practice? Where is
the threshold and how do I step across it?
Sometimes we mistakenly think of meditation
practice as staying within the protective container
of a physical environment, such as a retreat, or
following a set schedule or precepts. While these
act as boundaries for our practice, there is a more
subtle boundary that has to do with how we keep
our minds oriented toward practice.
People often talk about the challenges of
leaving retreat. They say that when they re-enter
their ordinary lives, their mind no longer feels
protected by or connected to their meditation
practice. This is because we mistake the external
boundary for the practice itself, when in fact the
boundary of practice is not something outside of
us, but has to do with how we relate to the rich
experience of our inner and outer worlds.
The physical boundary and precepts that define
the structure of our retreat serve as indispensable
supports for retreat practice. They keep us within
the sane confines of our intention, which is to find
our true resting place beyond grasping and rejec-
tion. But they are not the practice itself.
If we think meditating means just
applying a technique, we may never
experience the liberation that genuine
practice can bring, and we may
conclude that practice doesn’t work.
Value all experience
If practice is not merely a technique or some-
thing that can be identified by physical boundar-
ies and short passing experiences, then how do
we know when we are practicing and when we’re
not? I think we need to look at the fundamen-
tal attitude we bring to our experience. Are we
valuing all experience? Or are we succumbing to
our habitual tendencies to brace against what we
don’t like and grasp at what we find pleasurable?
Practice provides an opportunity to bear wit-
ness to such lapses without judging them. Rather
than becoming discouraged, we can appreciate
the potency of our ability to discern: What is
practice? What isn’t practice? This is a crucial
part of our inquiry and the beginning of respond-
ing to our experience with nonaggression.
Our ability to accept our humanness with all
its struggles, insights, and confusions increases
our capacity to behold both the beauty and suf-
fering we encounter in the world. This gives
rise to fearlessness, compassion, insight, and
an appreciation both of ourselves and of oth-
ers. Because we feel less intimidated by our mind
and world, we can walk through life with grace
and composure. Our relationship with the world
around us is less reactive and more responsive.
To be in sane relationship with our experi-
ence, our life, our world, we need to learn how
to digest experience—to let life touch us, nourish
us, and move through us rather than reacting
to it with so much fixation and preference. This
means we need to find a way of being that is
beyond grasping and rejection. Only then can we
enjoy our humanness in all its fullness. And isn’t
that the point of meditation?
spring 2013 buddhadharma: the practitioner’s quarterly 61