Is this meditation a good fit for me?
Finding fit by building self-trust
Readers have been surprised by my presentation of Opening Awareness, which involved going into a crowded park and letting yourself become aware of each perception without getting too involved with it. Most people understandably associate meditating with sitting in a really quiet room and focusing on the breath.
However, I explicitly don’t want to “sell” you on Opening Awareness. That’d defeat the purpose of everything I said in my previous essay about the importance of cultivating clarity.
Readers have consistently asked - how do I evaluate whether an unfamiliar practice like Opening Awareness is right for me? How can I cleanly test whether it’ll create value in my life without making disproportionate commitments to it?
I’ve spent years grappling with these questions as I learned from different teachers.
This essay is for you if you’d like concrete tools to wrestle with these questions.
The Headspace app was my first real introduction to meditation. I found it during an internship at Google. I desperately wanted to prove myself to get a job there, and I remember being wound up so tight. They gave us a free subscription to it, so I figured I’d check it out. The app helped me feel calmer whenever I actually sat down to meditate with it. However, its benefits were short-lived after the app session ended. Honestly, I didn’t see myself as a “meditator”. So I never did it very consistently. I had an on/off relationship with meditation for years because it never seemed to yield tangible structural changes to my life. I mean, I knew it was good for me in the same abstract way that I knew that I was “supposed” to eat vegetables. Which is another way of saying that I didn’t actually have a tangible reason to do it. Meditation seemed nice when I was acutely stressed and in despair. But it didn’t seem to offer any specific results outside of those moments. I’d immediately fall off the wagon once my life started to improve.
My severe burnout in 2019 invited me to revisit this pattern. My desperation for emotional stability led me to a Buddhist center in SF every Wednesday evening. Merely walking in that door would send a gentle ripple of calm throughout my body. Having a real, breathing, human teacher made an immense difference to my motivation to practice meditating. For the first time, I had someone that could explain not just what I needed to do, but why and how it’d create the specific positive results that I yearned for. I was totally mesmerized. Following my teacher’s programming to the letter helped me feel incredible amounts of calmness in my body. I’d never tasted such peace before. So I locked in. I built a fastidious daily habit and clocked in many, many hours.
I felt alive for the first time in years, maybe ever? I started reading everything I could about this specific type of Buddhist meditation. If these newbie gains were this good, I could only imagine what “enlightenment” would feel like. Attaining enlightenment became my north star. I started clocking in many thousands of hours of meditation over those couple years. I started to internalize Buddhism’s really expansive goals like the “perfection of wisdom” or “becoming perfectly present and non-reactive”. Indeed, my life started radically transforming for the better as I went deeper into these practices. I lost substantial tension in my body, my sleep improved, my nightmares improved, I felt more joy and just felt lighter.
This momentum encouraged me to learn from lots of different Buddhist lineages. My life started radically transforming within a few short years. Ironically, I eventually circled back to a problem I’d originally had before I’d become a meditator. I couldn’t figure out how these practices, lineages and teachers all fit together in my life. To what extent were my results due to my teachers, the practices (since each one is different), my own effort, my own neurological wiring or the surrounding community? This confusion made it difficult to cleanly communicate the benefits of this incredible mental technology to other people. It also made me vulnerable to falling irrationally in love with specific systems of practice and their teachers one after another. Sort of like listening to the same song on repeat and telling absolutely everyone about how great it was, until I got bored of it. This enthusiasm made me vulnerable to “spiritual bypassing”. That is, the propensity to use spiritual practices to avoid facing some of the thornier questions in my life.
I inevitably participated in various communities with cult-adjacent or salvific-adjacent dynamics whose ickiness I was okay overlooking. Honestly, it was just nice to spend a minute not feeling alone and alienated. I figured, if I’m insisting that I’m happy, and others are telling me that they’re happy too, then what’s the harm? All this was especially tricky to untangle because meditation practices and teachers are often tightly bundled with communities that provide fellowship, friendship, shared purpose and support beyond the practices themselves. I was particularly vulnerable to all this when I first moved to NYC. I didn’t know anyone and felt very lonely.
On the other hand, participating in these communities let me shift my identity, at least partly, from “rationalist tech bro skeptic” to “meditator”. This shift unlocked motivational juice to meditate consistently, which did improve my life. But this newfound identity made it harder to gain clarity on what I wanted outside either the tech bro worldview I was trying to leave behind, or what these lineages told me I should want.
Eventually, I stopped being willing to learn more practices and worldviews. I didn’t have enough self-trust and clarity to confidently say “this works for me” and “this didn’t work for me”. Don’t get me wrong. I knew I had a lot to learn. But I was so tired of each tradition’s implicit or explicit stance of all-or-nothing commitment. For example, I gained profound insights from listening to Ajahn Brahm’s dhamma talks on YouTube. Yet there was an impenetrable wall keeping me from going deeper into Theravada Buddhism. His Thai Forest tradition did have a system of practice for “laypeople”. However, it seemed to ultimately pointed towards material renunciation via monasticism, which simply didn’t resonate with me. To be fair, not every teacher required such levels of commitment from me. But I’d often feel unconscious pressure to conform within the broader cultural milieu. I just didn’t have the tools to think about trust/commitment in a more sophisticated way, that would allow me to participate in this culture without getting swept up by it.
Every major wisdom tradition has deep wisdom. I’ve learned so much from Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism and Islam. However, I wasn’t willing to commit wholesale to the metaphysics of each tradition. I wanted the capacity to self-author my own stance about what I believed, what I practiced, and how much of myself I consciously chose to offer to any given system. I wanted to be competent enough to take what was valuable from each tradition without compromising my sense of integrity and self-trust. Moreover, I wanted acceptance rather than wholesale agreement with each of these teachers and communities, while having the skill to truly see the world from their eyes. I aspired to a flexibility and integrity of being that allowed me to co-exist, learn from and create value with all sorts of different people, across varied metaphysical commitments. Some practitioners would find this aspiration totally incompatible with their wisdom traditions. That’s okay! I wanted to nevertheless strive to accept them even if they disagreed with me.
This came to a head when I confronted a stuckness that was reminiscent of when I first started meditating. I wanted to continue learning and growing. But on one hand, diving wholesale into a new thing felt like a bad idea. Unsurprisingly, I’d been burned too many times doing that. On the other hand, staying still and not dealing with my problems didn’t feel viable either.
I spent a long time wrestling with this tension. I eventually realized I’d kept hitting this wall for two reasons.
Initially, I’d conflated the category of “meditation” with specific practices like Mindfulness of the Breath during my first foray into Headspace. Rather than concluding that this specific practice delivered via a specific pedagogical channel didn’t work for me, I concluded that all “meditation” didn’t work for me. The word “meditation” is best thought of as being synonymous with the word “exercise”. That is, there are gazillions of different meditations that each target specific adaptations in your mind. It’s similar to how different physical exercises train different parts of your body. The specific result of an exercise in the gym is a function of the reps, sets, your nutrition, sleep, etc. Similarly, the specific result of a meditation depends both on the circumstances of the practitioner’s mind, and how that meditative exercise is applied to that mind.
Lots of gyms will bundle essentially the same finite set of joint movements to create their own unique “programming”. Meditation “lineages” (e.g. Thai Forest Tradition, Nyingma School, etc.) work in a similar way. CrossFit or Barry’s Bootcamp provide great workouts, but aren’t a good fit for everyone. Similarly, not all spiritual lineages are a good fit for everyone despite providing lots of value.
CrossFit gyms often bundle various value-adds like communal connection, psychological development, accountability, etc. It’s similar for meditation lineages that bundle community, etc.
So why does our culture equate “meditation” with focusing on the breath? This is a complex question with many historical nuances. Here’s a helpful oversimplification to wrap our heads around it.
Imagine that Bob is a personal trainer. He makes first contact with a largely sedentary and unfit population that’s never heard of the word “exercise”. He’s used to training competitive athletes, but he’d like to help these new people. What should he do? He can’t give them the “real” workout he gives his athletes. Their bodies wouldn’t be able to handle it. They’ve never even heard of the word “exercise”! He also doesn’t want to overwhelm or scare them away with too much information.
So he starts with just one exercise like squatting because it’s a functional compound movement. Voila! They start getting stronger, feel better and this new capacity in their body blows their minds. Word quickly spreads like wildfire of this newfangled thing called “exercise”.
People start clamoring to learn it not just from Bob, but his most experienced students too. Most people don’t realize that the exercise they’re doing (i.e. squats) is just one type of exercise. Honestly, they don’t really care. They just want positive results.
Eventually, some of Bob’s most experienced students start calling themselves “exercise teachers” but only teach squatting because that’s the only “exercise” they know. Bob’s not thrilled about this on two counts. One, this implicitly limits the possibilities offered by exercise. And two, these new teachers lack his depth, nuance and subtlety. However, such depth takes years to develop. Bob realizes that there’s an acute need right now, and these teachers have bills to pay.
Before long, there’s a cultural consensus around what “exercise” is, and everyone begins to associate “exercising” with squatting.
As an extremely crass oversimplification, such consensus formation is what happened to “meditation” in the West. David Chapman’s online book has a far deeper, more careful and accurate retelling of this story.
The second reason I struggled to learn new practices was that I routinely took goals that were useful for defining an orientation, and attempted to treat them as if they could create traction. “Becoming perfectly present and non-reactive” was useful for orienting me towards a deeper state of equanimity as a north star. But it didn’t give me a clean way to tell whether a specific practice, teacher or community was helping to create value in my life within specific contexts. I was already predisposed towards negative self-talk. Rather than cleanly considering whether a practice was a good fit for me, I’d often unhelpfully conclude that I was insufficiently dedicated, insufficiently surrendered or still trapped in some egoic resistance. Moreover, the non-specific nature meant that I’d see tangible results only after a massive breadth-first effort covering the different areas of my life simultaneously. Such effort could only be sustained via a correspondingly large up-front commitment with the relevant teacher/practice.
Orientation goals are not “bad”. But they need to be paired with tractable goals with gradually increasing scope to create the most value.
The following bullet is an example of an orientation goal because it points towards a broader orientation for being, but it’s not tractably measurable.
“I want to be non-reactive and cultivate presence.”
The following bullet is an example of a tractable goal because it translates “non-reactivity” and “presence” into observable behavior within a specific high-value context that can be tractably measured. Measuring success, failure and even intermediate categories like “bad”, “good”, “better” and “best” are far more tractable within such framings.
“I feel restless and interrupt my girlfriend, and talk over her whenever she increases her volume with me. Or whenever I feel accused of something. In five weeks, I’d like to reduce the likelihood of me interrupting her or talking over her, no matter what she’s saying at the moment.”
A thoughtful curriculum of tractable goals ultimately moves an individual towards their broader orientation. For example, once I’ve gained the ability to be more “non-reactive” with my girlfriend, I can work on doing this for other more difficult people. Or I can perhaps start with “easier” people before I start with my girlfriend. Eventually, I’ll become more non-reactive and present in general, if the right feedback loops and measurements are set up. Tractable goals allow me to become more of a “scientist” when it comes to my own development, because they give me access to cleaner evidence.
I’ve found a rule of thumb for finding such tractable goals. They make sense to my intuition and reason, but I feel some fear and resistance in actually pursuing them.
Tractable goals allow the student/teacher relationship to turn faith-based evaluation of progress and fit into evidence-based evaluation. The broader meditation community in the West is biased towards orientation goals for a variety of historical and cultural reasons.
This confusion is compounded by people conflating the power of a specific set of practices within a lineage, with a specific teacher’s capacity to reliably turn that power into value for the student. To come back to our fitness metaphor, even though the broader field of “personal training” has the knowledge/power to strengthen your squats, not all PTs would be a good relational fit for you.
Tractable goals protect against unconsciously falling back on the storied history of a lineage (”this is a 2000-year-old tradition”), the teacher’s reputation (”he brought the Buddha’s dharma to the West, and everyone says he’s enlightened”), the practice’s power (”this practice is called The Great Perfection because it’s the highest form of Buddhism”), or the teacher’s own personal development (”I have attained every single jhana and can reliably find rigpa”). Such goals are a powerful vehicle for building self-trust by creating clarity, for both the student and the teacher.
I’ve learned to ask myself a number of self-provocative questions before I commit to working with a new teacher. These questions help me cleanly disentangle the value of the meditation, teacher and community. I treat them as rules of thumb rather than a perfect system. Note that they’re not a “teacher-scoring system”. Rather, they’re designed to build self-trust by creating clarity.
The questions below in italics can be used as journal prompts for self-reflection.
1. Own your projections around wanting the teacher to be “perfect”. There’s no such thing as a “perfect” teacher. There’s a fine line between being in awe of a specific teacher or system, and putting them on a pedestal by idealizing them. Awe and aspiration can be helpful for all kinds of reasons, including providing motivation. However, idealization makes it easier to erode self-trust, which in turn makes it easier to get swept up in charisma, authority, belonging and longing.
What am I hoping this teacher will relieve me from having to know, choose or feel for myself?
2. First contact with a teacher. The first few 1:1 coaching sessions with a new teacher can provide useful signals in how they relate to their lineage and to their students.
Do they immediately jump towards committing you as a student towards some specific orientation goal, or jump towards teaching you some methods? Do they immediately invite you into an extremely emotional experience by walking you through some meditation practice?
Or do they slow down enough to understand how they’d be able to co-create value for you within the context of your life, via grounded tractable goals?
Do I experience this teacher becoming curious about the specifics of my actual life, and co-creating specific tractable goals that will create value in my life? Or do they seem to immediately route me towards their practices?
3. What’s it like asking “why?” and “how?” at increasing depth? Many teachers rely on lineage authority or rote-learned theory without actually understanding the deeper principles of why and how a given method works within a specific student’s circumstances. This can make it harder to cleanly evaluate their practice’s value, especially if I haven’t already co-created tractable goals with them.
In their defense, there are many reasons why certain practices are somewhat illegible from the outside. I’ll usually accept this. However, I often prefer to understand ahead of time what kind of commitment is being asked of me, what the practice is supposed to train, why it is plausibly connected with my tractable goal, what signs would suggest a mismatch, and what I should do if I start having a bad time.
I generally require greater levels of such understanding for larger commitments.
Do I understand why and how this practice should help me make progress towards this grounded goal, to justify the commitment this practice requires?
4. Giving practices room to breathe Some of the most valuable practices I’ve ever done were initially too illegible for me to understand. In such cases, creating non-negotiable boundaries allowed me to surrender into the practice with clear bounds.
Have I given this practice enough bounded commitment to reveal its value, without giving more than I can give cleanly?
5. Figuring out where I’m stuck, and where this teacher can’t help. When you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Not all lineages are a good fit for every student. Not all teachers within the same lineage are a good fit for every student. Not all teachers are a great fit for every tractable goal, even if they already have a great relationship with a given student.
As a teacher myself, I’ll own that there’s a real temptation to solve every problem with my preferred toolbox of solutions. However, referring a student to someone else is sometimes the most valuable thing I can do for them.
If you visit an ENT for post-nasal drip symptoms, and they believe it’s a GI issue, they’ll then refer you to a GI doctor. Such referrals are common in healthcare and considered “responsible”. However, in my experience, wisdom teachers often lack such referral norms, which limits the amount of value they can cleanly create.
Can this teacher help me find where I’m actually stuck, and would I trust them to say when their work is no longer the right support for me?
6. Separating the practice, teacher and community There’ve been many instances where I stayed in a community long after it stopped being a good fit for me, mostly because I was confused about the role that community played in my life. Attachment to a person or community isn’t “bad” per se. But it can mask dependency or avoidance. Unpacking and reflecting on my attachment to a given practice, teacher or community has been consistently helpful for me.
If I lost access to the practice, the teacher, or the community separately, what exactly would I miss from each one, and would that grief reveal a source of value I want to consciously choose, or a dependency that has started choosing for me?
7. Calibrated shares of vulnerability The student’s commitment towards the process of transformation is one of the biggest variables that governs how fast they’ll grow within a student/teacher relationship. Larger commitments require proportionate amounts of trust between the student and teacher. However, as a student, I don’t like losing access to my own discomfort, and therefore self-trust and clarity.
I proactively test a teacher’s trustworthiness to hold power within a 1:1 relationship via calibrated authentic shares of vulnerability, fear, doubt and discomfort. It’s encouraging if the teacher can hold and participate within that vulnerability without losing their role as the teacher.
In contrast, I might infer that I need to help protect the teacher’s specialness if the teacher puffs themselves up after such a share. Or I might infer that I perhaps need to help manage the teacher’s emotions if they make themselves smaller in relation to the share. The most subtle indicator is if the teacher remains energetically blank as a rock. This is when they don’t energetically or verbally reciprocate my vulnerability and continue waiting for me to make the next move. Whenever this happens, I might wonder if my share has actually landed for them. This doubt makes it harder to grow more vulnerable with them, or to trust them with more power in my life.
Again, these are rules of thumb and not a perfect system to mindlessly follow.
Does sharing a fear, doubt or discomfort help the relationship feel more real, or does it feel like there’s a barrier towards connection?
8. Gradual growth of trust and commitment Trust and commitment begin to gradually increase in a feedback loop once a student/teacher relationship takes off. Of course, all relationships reach their natural ceilings eventually. Every positive result, especially along tractable goals, creates more trust in the relationship. This in turn acts as a base for safely increasing commitment, which creates space to unlock more value from the practice. Greater levels of trust and commitment allow each party to negotiate increases in each. I prefer doing this in a way that’s grounded in evidence (i.e. tractable goals), rather than via fear, charisma, adrenaline, communal pressure or desperation.
Am I being asked for a level of commitment that is ahead of the evidence this relationship has produced, and do I feel safe having an explicit conversation with the teacher about this?
Opening Awareness has changed my life, but it’s not for everyone. My whole point is that there’s no such thing as a practice that’s “perfect” for everyone, across all contexts of their lives.
A meditation is a good fit for me when:
I can clearly articulate what it’s for.
It’s oriented towards some tractable goal that creates value.
I can test it cleanly with a manageable dose, to witness tangible evidence within my life.
I can grow trust/commitment both with the meditation and the teacher gradually, and consciously.
I’m happy to chat if you’re trying to evaluate whether a meditation practice, teacher or community is right for you, or if you’re curious about how you’d be able to create tractable goals for a given practice. Please reach out at varun@doubleascent.com.
Acknowledgements
Brian Whetten - for helping me formalize these ideas and giving me a framework for exploring them.
Charlie Awbery and David Chapman - for teaching me Vajrayana Buddhism, and introducing me to the history of Buddhism in the West.
John Vervaeke - for helping me map out the space of religious practices, and how they likely work in the brain.
Love it, maps well to my experience in a way I haven't articulated!