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Is There a Right Way to Do This? · Reading Your Own Life with Swami Larry

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome back to Reading Your Own Life with Swami Larry.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: We are in season two, Meditate Right for Your Personality Type.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: And episode four.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: Is there a right way to do this?
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: You might believe that somewhere out there is the right way to meditate, the perfect technique, the one that the masters use, the one that would finally work for you if somebody would teach it to you properly.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of people carry that belief around.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: Some have carried it for decades through several abandoned attempts, still assuming the problem was the version they tried, and that the perfect version is still out there waiting.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I understand that belief, but I want to show you that it has things backwards.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: There is no perfect meditation.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: There never has been.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: Once you see why, the whole idea changes, because the search stops being about finding the right technique and starts being about finding your technique.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: Those are very different searches, and only one of them ever lets you stop looking.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: So let me start with a question that ought to puzzle you more than it probably does.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: If meditation is one thing, if there's one right way to do it, then why did traditions produce so many ways?
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: Look at what the contemplative world actually contains.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: There are breath practices, dozens of them.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: There are mantra practices where a word or sound is repeated until the mind settles around it.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: There are visualization practices rich with imagery and bare attention practices that strip everything away.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: Meditation is done sitting, standing, lying down, walking.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: There are moving traditions where the practice is motion.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: Some meditate with eyes closed, some insist the eyes stay open, some practice in silence, some in song.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: I've tried many of these myself.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: All that variety tells us something important.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: These techniques weren't invented casually.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: They came out of traditions that took this work more seriously than we take almost anything else.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: Lineages that refined their methods over many generations and kept only what yielded results.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: These were the world's experts on the human mind, working over centuries.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: And over centuries, they did not converge on a single technique.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: They diverged into hundreds.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: When serious people work on a problem for a long time and keep coming up with different solutions, it usually means the problem itself has a variable.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_01: The variable here is obvious once you say it out loud.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_01: It's the human being.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: Minds are different, temperaments are different.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: A technique that settles one person agitates another.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: The traditions knew this intimately from the inside.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: In the old teaching relationships, a student didn't pick a technique out of a book.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: This student gets breath.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: This one gets mantra.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: The restless one walks.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: Different prescriptions, same goal.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: The variety wasn't a failure to agree on the right answer.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: The variety was the answer.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I've seen this from both sides.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: My own path wandered through more than one tradition.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: I've practiced in ways that would look from the outside like completely different activities.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: Some mornings my practice is seated.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: Some days it's movement.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: Some days it's ten minutes beside water.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: It depends on the day.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: It depends on the season, maybe even my mood.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: And for a long time, I kind of half suspected this made me maybe a less serious practitioner because I changed my mode.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: But now I believe it makes me a more honest one.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: The purpose never changes.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: The doorway does.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: So if your practice has changed shaped over the years, that's not evidence that you lack commitment.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: It might be evidence you've been paying attention all along.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_01: So if the technique isn't the point, then what is?
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: Every meditation technique ever devised is a support structure for the same simple act.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: Attention resting on something, returning when it wanders.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: That's the common core underneath all the variety.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: The breath practices give attention at home in the body.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: The mantra practices give it a sound hold on to.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: The walking practices, they give a restless body a rhythm so the mind can settle into it.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: Let's strip away the costumes and the vocabulary.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_01: And every technique is doing the same job.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: Giving your particular mind a way to practice presence that your particular mind will actually accept.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: And once you understand that, you hold the key to evaluating any practice you ever encounter.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: The question is never whether a technique is authentic, ancient, or advanced enough.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: The question is whether it helps you rest your attention and return it.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: If it does that, it's meditation, whatever it looks like.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: If it doesn't do that for you, whatever it does for your neighbor or a monk on the mountainside, then for you, it's the wrong tool.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: Not a bad tool, just the wrong tool for this hand and for this job.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I can feel you might have a reasonable objection forming.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: If there's no perfect technique and switching is allowed, doesn't that give restless people a permanent excuse?
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: Try a practice for three days, declare it a mismatch, move on, and call the whole endless shopping trip a meditation practice.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_01: That's fair concern.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_01: The answer is that there's a difference between finding your doorway and refusing to walk through any of them.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: Every practice, including the one that's genuinely right for you, will have flat days, boring days, days you'd rather do anything else.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_01: That's not a mismatch.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: That's just the practice.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_01: And there's the tell, though, and it's worth knowing.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: Friction feels like resistance to practicing.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_01: Mismatch feels like resistance inside the practice.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: The person whose doorway fits will still groan about getting into it some mornings, but once they're in it, something eases more days than not.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: The person in the wrong doorway can be disciplined, show up faithfully, and still come out the other side of every session round tighter than they went in.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: If weeks of honest effort leave you consistently more agitated, that's not a character flaw announcing itself.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: That's information about the fit.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: So here's the working rule.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: When you try a practice, give it an honest trial.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: A few weeks of consistency, long enough to get past the honeymoon and past the first resistance.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: Then ask yourself one question, not was every session pleasant?
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: Because it won't be.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_01: Ask, does this practice fit me well enough that I actually keep doing it?
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_01: Because that in the end is the entire ball game.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: A technically inferior practice that you do five days a week will transform your life.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: The world's most refined technique, never practiced, will do exactly nothing.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: The best meditation for you, the only perfect meditation there is, is the one you will actually do.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: And notice what that rule requires.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: To pick a door away with any intelligence, you need to know something first, not about meditation, but about yourself.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: What kind of mind do you actually have?
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: Does it settle in stillness or motion?
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: Does it want structure or freedom?
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: Silence or sound?
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: Solitude or company?
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_01: Most people have never even been asked those questions in their lives, let alone asked them in connection with meditation.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_01: Which brings us finally to the question what this whole structure is about and that we've been walking toward.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_01: Who are you?
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_01: And which way was built for someone like you?
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: And that's where we'll go next.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: And we'll find out then.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: So join me next time for episode five.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: What kind of mind do you actually have?
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for being with us, and we'll see you next time.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_01: I'm Swami Larry.