In among all of the subjects we can discuss, and all of the specialities required for effective treatment of mental health challenges, there’s a reason why meditation is my favourite topic and the practice I come back to again and again.
Surprising though it may seem, I’m of the view that long-term management of the struggles life, big and small, isn’t really effective or even possible without developing a regular meditation practice.
It’s certainly possible to get effective help for the tangible, direct issues that arise for people that lead to working with a psychotherapist. And the many discreet, practical changes a client can make in their lives will resolve or at least significantly reduce the bulk of their difficulties.
But at the end of the day most people seeking support are actually looking for help with the challenges of the human condition, and those challenges never really stop. Specific issues can be resolved, problems overturned, circumstances changed, but life itself is all about change and one of the constants is that it can be a bumpy ride.
That’s where meditation comes in. The only other long-term option is pharmaceutical help (which suppresses rather than addresses most difficulties). In that case, I see meditation is the most effective medication.
In another article I’ve already spoken about the utility of witnessing the mind as a way to develop detachment and distance from your own mental processes. Witnessing and meditation work hand in hand.
But it is a fair question to ask: what is meditation exactly?
In the shortest answer possible, meditation is focusing on something real, like the breath, and not thinking. But it’s often the case that people want more complicated answers for simple things – and the amount of offerings and practices out there (labelled as meditations, but are not meditation) makes expanding that definition worthwhile.
We also think about meditation (see what I did there?) as sitting in a half-lotus position with our fingers curled in mystical formations while we become one with the universe, but meditation can become a way of being in the world simply by becoming present (mindfulness) and not filtering all of that lived experience through our thoughts. Ideally, meditation is a lived practice, not just something for a few minutes per day.
That said, a formal meditation practice is a great way to start developing that skill before ramping up the difficulty levels.
There’s an old Zen koan that explains the whole thing quite beautifully: Sitting quietly doing nothing, spring comes and the grass grows by itself.
In this sense, “doing nothing” also means not thinking.
It’s easy enough to say meditation is staying with what is real and refraining from thought, but we are hardwired to live in our heads and thinking comes “naturally” to most human beings as a result of the process we’ve lived through since we were small children, back when most of us practised mindfulness naturally.
Worse, the moment we get into “trying not to think” we are basically thinking about thinking, which is the realm of either a) people who really want to suffer, and b) Classical philosophy.
So here’s where the witness comes in.
We witness our thoughts from a place of detachment. The witness is a part of the mind, but it’s a type of awareness, not a thought in and of itself.
The witness simply witnesses the thoughts coming and going from that place of detachment. It doesn’t think about them. It neither judges nor evaluates or analyses the thought.
Witnessing is a form of active awareness that allows us, the thinker, to resist the invitation to engage in those thoughts. If we do, we just follow them down the rabbit hole and become lost in thought again, as per usual.
It’s one thing to be aware of thoughts coming and going. It’s another to fall under their spell and disappear into rumination or contemplation. That’s certainly not meditation and it’s the single-most common experience for people starting out in developing their own meditation practice.
They get lost in thought and then despondent about meditation. And then they give up.
So take heart: whatever you practice, you can get good at. And none of us start out as experts in any new endeavour, however much we might wish for it.
Practice, practice, practice. In time you will experience the peace and detachment that comes with meditation. And after that, when troubles arise, the witness can simply witness what comes and goes, remembering the old proverb “And this too shall pass.”