Discover the Spotlight: An Introduction to Meditation

Welcome back!

This month, February 2021, we’ll be dissecting one of my favourite topics; meditation. I’m sure that most of you reading this have a rough idea as to what meditation is, maybe you’ve done it a few times, or you might have a regular practice. One of the wonderful things about meditation is that it’s a constant reminder to begin, to start over, again and again. It teaches, among many things, patience and the ability to start fresh each moment. So even if you’ve been meditating for years, there is always something to uncover and witness. It’s all passing show. So for the next 4 weeks, I will progressively dive deeper and deeper into the purpose, experiences, qualities, and outcomes that a meditation practice can manifest.

This week I want to give an introduction to meditation; some of what I’ll talk about has been taught to me by meditation teachers, some of which I’ve stumbled across in my own practice. BIG emphasis on “stumbled”.

Discovering the Spotlight

Attention, within the context of meditation, has been called “the spotlight”.

Imagine you are inside a big dark room, and the only thing you have is a flashlight. To look around the room, you need to use your flashlight. Whatever is illuminated by your flashlight can be seen and worked with easily. Without it, the room more or less disappears, at least the visual aspect. Additionally, whatever you aren’t looking at also disappears. Attention works very similarly psychologically. Wherever the spotlight goes, so too does attention; whatever the spotlight lands on is within attention. And fortunately for us, we can have a great deal of control over our spotlight; and if you, like many people, feel like your attentional abilities are lacking, you’ll be happy to hear you can have a massive impact on your spotlight. Our ability to consciously maneuver the spotlight is a powerful skill and can be a potent antidote to certain sources of suffering stemming from (and creating) anxiety and depression.

Think of how many times you’ve felt trapped or bothered by negative thoughts. Now think of how that experience might’ve been different if you had the ability to move your attentional spotlight off those negative thoughts and onto something more positive.

Meditation can be used as a training tool for our attention. In fact, certain kinds of meditation have this exact intention in mind.

Attention is a cognitive process that uses many different neural structures and can be highly honed and developed. The difference between developed attention vs underdeveloped attention is sustainability, cost, and clarity; how long and clearly it can be held, and how cognitively “expensive” it is. If you have never meditated a day in your life, and decide that for the next hour, you are going to pay attention to nothing but your right hand, you might get about 2-5 minutes of sporadically held attention followed by 50 exhausting minutes of thinking about whatever comes down the pipe (this is just an example, some people have very beautiful experiences the first time they meditate because of the potent relaxation effects). This is because the cognitive structures that are associated with attention (many cortical and subcortical areas) are untrained. The neural fuel and sophistication that is required for clear, light, and sustained attention just hasn’t been invested in and thus will exhaust quickly with a very slow recovery period. Think of going to the gym for the first time and trying to do the same workout that someone who has trained for years is doing. It’s not a fault or lack of skill on your part, it’s just biology! If you practice, it will come.

“Meditation can be many things, but to beginners and long-time practitioners alike, it is a workout for our attention muscles”

What is Meditation?

Now that we’ve had a brief intro to the idea of attention, we can dive into what meditation is.

The cliche descriptions we often hear describe meditation as an activity where you sit or lay down and pay attention to the here and now; to be present and non-judging. Now maybe I’m the only one with this experience, but the first time I read about meditation descriptions like this, I walked away feeling confused and highly skeptical about the proposed benefits and experiences meditation can offer.

“Aren’t you always in the “here and now?” I thought. “What could one possibly gain by acknowledging this? Is there even a point of acknowledging it? It’s like being alive… you’re alive whether you’re aware of it or not”.

10 years of meditation practice later, I can confidently say it is one of the few most beneficial practices I have in my life.

Meditation is a broadly used term to essentially mean “paying attention, on purpose”. What exactly you are paying attention to is mostly up to you (and defines the type of meditation you’re doing). There are types of meditation that include certain behaviours like certain cadences of breathing or movement, but for the sake of ease of understanding, I’ll talk about Vipassana meditation today, also called Insight Meditation. I view Vipassana meditation as analogous to learning how to use a knife before getting a job in a kitchen. It’s simple, but nearly every type of cooking rests on your ability to use a knife, so it’s a great place to start.

Vipassana meditation is a practice where one intentionally places sustained focus or attention on a piece of your conscious experience. Whether that is paying attention to the tip of your nose as air moves in and out, or your belly as it brushes along the inside of your shirt, or taking on the whole orchestra of sensation within your body, vipassana meditation is very much about feeling.

Now the practice component can become starkly obvious when one decides to sit down and attempt this. You sit down, maybe close your eyes, and begin to breathe. As you begin to intentionally place your attention on the tip of your nose, you notice that there are thoughts pulling at your attention. Maybe you get a few seconds of feeling before your mind is washed away into how silly you feel, or what you had for dinner last night, or the fact that you can’t remember what you had for dinner last night… “what did I have for dinner last night? It was just last night… how could I forget - ah yes, right, salmon". And before you know it, you’re no longer meditating, and for the past 8 minutes have been sitting and thinking about whatever thoughts cross your mind. Then you notice your attention has drifted, and bring it back to the tip of your nose.

This is the practice.

Remember when I said that meditation teaches, among other things, patience and the ability to begin over and over again? This is precisely why. You quickly notice on some level or another, that there is a “person” in you who decided to sit down and learn to meditate, and then there is a “person” in there who is a bit like a puppy, lunging and biting at whatever comes across your mind. These two “people” are unironically linked, where one goes, so does the other. Ideally, you respond to this in the same way that you would respond if you were actually with a puppy; you pick it up and bring it back to where you want it. Then you watch it as it wanders off again and again. You don’t get angry, you just learn to expect it, and you pick it up and put it back.

Later this week I’ll be posting a video of a brief guided meditation for those of you out there who want to give this a shot. In the meantime, there are tons of great guided meditation sessions on YouTube. And if I had to suggest one, Sam Harris’ guided sessions are the best I’ve come across in terms of understandability and ease of following along.

I’ll see you guys later this week. Have a great day.