Day 4 - Module 2

1. Intentional and Unintentional Effort: There are two types of effort - intentional and unintentional effort.  You may feel like you are putting some effort into your meditation even though you don’t want to.  That’s unintentional effort.  Don’t worry about it.  Your job isn’t to fix anything in your meditation.  

2. Measures of Progress: Any of these three things indicate that meditation is likely working for you.

   1. Seeing benefits in your life: less stressed or more calm, your reaction to triggers change, you become more accepting of things in your life and better sleep are possibilities but there can be many others.

   2. You are becoming more OK with whatever your meditation is like that day.  

   3. You find that the amount of unintentional effort you put into your meditation decreases over time.

3. Progress to where it’s Like Brushing Teeth: When you start this type of meditation, it’s understandable to look how the meditation feels day to day and try to assess what’s happening.  Over time, the goal is for it to be where your attitude is like your attitude to brushing teeth.  You brush your teeth because you are confident that it helps you get fewer cavities than if you don’t brush your teeth.  You still may get some, but your mouth will be in better shape overall if you brush.  You don’t think, “I really did a good job on my left molars today.” You just do it without worrying about how your teeth brushing is going.  Hopefully this meditation will work for you and over time, you’ll get closer to where you just meditate and don’t worry about how that day’s meditation felt because you know overall that meditation has been helpful for you.

4. It works by not feeling like you think it’s supposed to: This meditation adapts pieces of Vipassana and TM.  They have similar theories of how they work - your mind settles down when you meditate until you hit something in your mind that you need to release.  As it releases, your meditation gets all stormy.  After it is released, your mind settles down again.   It’s not as literal as in this picture, but I feel that there is a lot of truth in this explanation.  And what that means is that your meditation isn’t always supposed to feel good or productive, but it’s still working on you, so just take it as it comes.

5. Warning: I want to warn you about something that happened to me on my second Vipassana retreat.  I was paying attention to my shoulder with a relaxed, effortless attention I had never experienced before.  I normally have pretty lousy posture when I meditate, but I felt my spine spontaneously  straighten one vertebrae at a time.  I think it lasted a few minutes, and it was wonderful.  I thought, “this is what I have to get to.  This is the purpose.  Why didn’t they tell us that.”  For the next day or two I was trying to get back to this state and it totally screwed up my meditation.  That was over 20 years ago and it hasn’t happened again.  The point of this story is that you may have a deep or trippy experience while meditating.  Don’t think that’s the goal.  Remember this if you find yourself trying to  forcing your mind to get back there. 

I would suggest a meditation practice of 20 minutes twice a day.  However, the most important thing is to have a daily practice - 10 minutes a day is better than 20 minutes every other day. If you want to start small, that's better than not starting at all.  After a month or two, if you are experiencing benefits in your life, you might want to try increasing your practice to see if that increases the benefits.   But it's your meditation so it's your call.  I really hope this helps you.  I encourage you to reach out if you think I can help.

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