What I Got Wrong About Meditation

A few years ago, I began my journey through graduate school intending to become a therapist. I was new to the world of psychotherapy and soaked up what I was learning like a sponge. In those first few weeks of school, my professor introduced our class to mindfulness and meditation.

With eyes closed, I sat comfortably in our classroom as the dim glow from the projector flickered about the room, and an online meditation instructor with an Australian accent piped in through the speakers, guiding our focus of attention. I remember moving through a meditation exercise with our class and how I felt incredibly focused and centered in a way I had never experienced before.

This first encounter with meditation—combined with being a neophyte to mindfulness and psychotherapy— led me to think I could use meditation as a means of escape from emotional distress. It took me a few years to realize that while anxiety alleviation can be a byproduct of meditation, it is not the goal.

The flaws of this approach became apparent when I started recommending meditation as a tool to assuage my clients’ emotional pain. Clients reported about their experience with meditation saying, “I couldn’t be alone with my thoughts,” “I kept wondering, am I doing it right? Is this it?” and “I tried it, but it didn’t work. My anxiety is still here.”

Initially, I thought my clients needed to give it more time; like any discipline, mindfulness is not learned overnight. Now I’ve realized the problem was not my clients’ practice but how I purposed meditation as a coping skill of avoidance rather than a way to attend to the present moment.

I suspect many people view meditation as a means of escape from pain, which is why I’ve found myself more cautious to suggest meditation as a therapeutic coping skill. It’s not that I don’t believe in its effectiveness. In fact, neuroscience and counseling research has shown meditation to help with insight, emotional regulation, and being present (Hanson & Mendius, 2009). Meditation is a powerful tool, but now I worry that people’s expectations for it are too high or worse—they want to use meditation as a means of escape.

My previously held view of meditation as a means of escape isn’t unique to me. Mark Epstein (2018), a Buddhist psychiatrist, writes a humorous account of a hermit in Nepal who spent years meditating alone in a cave. Villagers would bring him food to keep him healthy as he worked to master meditative techniques. The hermit learned the Dalai Lama (a Buddhist figure comparable to the Pope) was passing through his town, and he somehow managed to arrange a meeting with the visiting spiritual teacher. During the meeting, the hermit tells of his meditative practice and long periods of solitude, and he asks the Dali Lama for some parting wisdom. The Dalai Lama responds matter-of-factly, “Get a life.”

I can’t help but smile every time I think of the Dalai Lama’s surprising admonishment. I certainly would not expect this retort from the most venerated Buddhist teacher. The wisdom here is not that meditation isn’t valuable; rather, meditation is not to be used out of piety or as an act of avoidance. No one is above it all. It was time for the hermit to return to reality, take care of his family, and let go of spiritual rituals as a means of evasion.

Spiritual Bypassing

In my faith tradition, I became keenly aware of a form of avoidance similar to the hermit’s. During my senior year of college, I was feeling anxious about the future—as most graduating students do. I felt like my life was ending, and I was worried about losing my friends, not having a job lined up, not being ready for the reality of adulthood, etc. I was barely sleeping and felt an all-encompassing sense of dread everywhere I went—a feeling that seems eerily similar to our collective experience in 2020.

During this time, a well-meaning mentor heard of my troubles, and in an attempt to provide help, he discussed how God was in control and reminded me to pray. Unfortunately, he added nothing else, and I left feeling an unpleasant mixture of shame and frustration for feeling anxious. I expressed a vague sense of gratitude to validate his desire to feel useful, but I knew I was betraying myself. I wasn’t grateful; nor was I helped.

I’m sure those who have been in religious circles can relate to hearing common clichés like, “Have you prayed about it?” and “Everything happens for a reason.” While these statements are perhaps well-intended, the impact is dismissive of people’s pain, and they often set the tone for how religious people are expected to ineffectively deal with emotional distress.

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John Welwood, a Buddhist psychotherapist, called this form of religious avoidance “spiritual bypassing” and defined it as "the tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks" (Clarke et al., 2013). Of course, spiritual truth and practices are useful for many religious people, but only so long as they augment the therapeutic practice of contemplation and a self-compassionate presence with pain. In my experience, I fear many religious and non-religious folks prioritize fixing others over empathetically attending to their suffering.

Bare Attention

Buddhism and mindfulness offer a mental posture toward pain that doesn’t avoid, fight off, or dismiss. Nyanaponika Thera (1968), a German Buddhist monk, describes this mental posture of mindfulness as Bare Attention.

He writes, “Bare Attention is the clear and single-minded awareness of what actually happens to us and in us at the successive moments of perception.” Mark Epstein (1995) elaborates on Bare Attention by describing it as “...just the bare facts, an exact registering, allowing things to speak for themselves as if seen for the first time…” In essence, Bare Attention strikes a balance of attending to the reality of the present moment without letting it swallow us whole.

To help contextualize Bare Attention further, Epstein offers an experiential focus on this discipline through an unconventional group meditation in which he asks his participants to turn on their cell phone notification sounds—effectively killing any chance of uninterrupted silence. Many people have the idea that silence in meditation is integral to getting rid of thoughts, but not thinking is impossible. However, through Bare Attention, we can learn to quiet the ego’s constant judgment and chasing of thoughts.

So as the cell phone notifications ding and ringtones pepper the room, Epstein asks his participants to use Bare Attention by hearing the sounds as they are—as if hearing them for the first time—without assigning any judgment to them. The mind’s natural inclination is to investigate, wonder, and evaluatively comment on every experience, but Bare Attention asks our egos to take a step back and simply notice the bare facts without evaluative commentary.

It’s not that our mind’s evaluation isn’t psychologically useful. Without evaluation, we wouldn’t be able to analyze ideas, subvert oppression, and leave toxic relationships. Certainly, evaluation is necessary for our survival and flourishing. However, we have a tendency to trust damaging evaluations or over-index our good analyses by preemptively extending them to every new context, effectively locking us out of experiencing the present moment as it is. Both put us in a poor position to be present and hamper our ability to relate well to others and ourselves.

Bare Attention helps us stay with the present moment a little longer by noticing only the raw psychosomatic feeling of emotions while dialing down the internal judgments. Epstein's meditative exercise teaches us to sit with every sensory feeling without trying to push it out or brood over it. Of course, our judgments will occasionally surface, but we can choose not to engage by gently redirecting our concentration to just the bare sensations. This honest posture of acceptance toward emotions on a moment to moment basis is precisely what non-attachment is all about.

A few weeks ago, one of my clients recently confessed that therapy was “oversold” to her. She had been in and out of therapy, and many techniques, cognitive reframing, and coping skills, although occasionally helpful, failed to eradicate her depression.

I resonated deeply with that sentiment. We all have moments of overselling ourselves and others on a litany of religious and non-religious practices—meditation included—in efforts to deflect and avoid pain. As my client learned about Bare Attention, she noticed how the experience changes her internal commentary from “prescriptive to descriptive.” Her insight captures the essence of what it looks like to nonjudgmentally experience painful emotions without attachment to the repetitive narratives of “this always happens to me,” “I’m not good enough,” and “nobody likes me.”

Perhaps the hermit in Nepal felt oversold on meditation, and his disillusionment led him to seek wisdom from the Dalai Lama. Maybe he had temporary success avoiding life through spiritual bypassing, but after four years of being the meditation guru he believed himself to be, he finally had to ask, “Is this it?”

The Dali Lama’s wisdom to “get a life” serves as a reminder that no one is above experiencing pain and reality, but the process shouldn’t end with that realization. It is through approaches such as Nyanaponika’s explanation of Bare Attention that we can find a way to attend to emotional pain through non-attachment. Because while there is no dismissing or avoiding trauma, there are better ways to relate to it.