“Am I doing it right?!”
Simplistically speaking, you could say that there are two different ways to meditate. In the first, it is all about getting it right or getting it wrong, about how well or how badly you do it, and about whether it meets your expectations as to how it should be. It is mostly about mental focus, the extent to which you have been able to silence, direct and control your mind. When you stray from your intended focus, you tend to see it as something going wrong, and judge yourself accordingly. At the end of the meditation, you will feel either satisfied or disappointed about your degree of mind control and about what—if anything— you think that you got out of doing the practice.
In the second, rather than trying to make something happen or block anything out, you practice accepting yourself however you are. Even though you might have an intention for the practice, such as staying with the breath or the sensations in the body, you are patient when you become distracted and curious about what shows up, such as memories, feelings and sensations. You might even choose to spend a little time investigating them before returning to your chosen focus. Rather than judge yourself, you accept that, for whatever reason, your mind, body and emotions are the way that they on this occasion. At the same time, you might playfully experiment with what helps you to settle, such as respectfully acknowledging and naming difficulties, or changing your attitude to one that is more patient and accepting. Whatever happens during the practice, you take it as an opportunity to experience yourself as you are, to practice bringing kind attention to whatever presents itself.
Anyone who has done some meditation will likely be familiar with the first of these two ways, which it is all too easy to slip into. After all, this is how we go about doing most things in our day-to-day life: we set out to achieve a certain outcome, we constantly evaluate our progress (which sometimes tips over into self-criticism), and we feel disappointment or satisfaction, frustration or elation, according to the results. In mindfulness language, this is often called the “doing mode of mind”, and is what has helped humans to achieve many great things.
But the invitation in meditation is to take a different approach, to cultivate the much-neglected 'being mode of mind', which is more about the journey than the destination. Rather than trying to achieve anything, we are quietly training in cultivating a different relationship to our experience. Recognising that many of the mind's unhelpful qualities are deeply ingrained, we patiently cultivate more helpful qualities, such as non-judgment, kindness, acceptance and “beginners mind” (seeing things with fresh awareness). The difficulties that we experience during meditation, rather than being something going wrong, are an important part of this process, because they enable us to practice approaching experience in this way.
