Discussing your meditation with a qualified guide helps you make fuller use of Acem Meditation's potential for growth.
Guidance of this kind is recommended from time to time, even if you do not have a meditation problem. It will enhance the quality of your practice and increase its effectiveness. Also, the connections between your meditation and your life may become more apparent, stimulating personality development.
As far as we know, the type of guidance given in Acem is unique.
It is grounded in Acem's understanding of 'actualisation'.
When you have meditated for some time, you typically encounter so-called actualisation phases. In these, your personality and characteristic modes of behaviour influence your way of meditating, so that you begin to deviate from the free mental attitude that is a central principle in Acem Meditation. Without guidance, this pattern of meditation easily becomes entrenched. Guidance helps you modify your practice and thus to take one of the first steps towards personal growth.
Other schools of meditation deal differently with such challenges. Not all techniques have the same potential for actualisation, and even an effective technique will not bring about actualisation if the time allotted to daily meditations is too short.
Certain Buddhist groups arrange retreats in which the participants are encouraged not to speak at all. The purpose is to break with habitual ways of thinking, but it is far from clear that silence actually has the desired effect. On the contrary, the lack of discussion may make it more difficult to reach insights about impasses in your meditation practice.
There are also schools of meditation that give guidance, but in quite a mechanical way. The meditator asks questions and the guide provides answers. Sometimes the guidance even follows a prescribed formula in which the guide chooses his or her answers from a list of authorised responses.
Such guidance may help clarify the basic principles, but it cannot facilitate the unravelling of more fundamental problems.
In still other schools of meditation, guidance is a way to check whether the meditator's experiences indicate that he or she is on the right track. However, if the meditator becomes too concerned with achieving the right kinds of experience, feelings, or states of mind, this tends to limit mental freedom. In Acem's understanding, what different meditators have in common lies not so much in the content of meditation as in its performance - in what you actually do when you meditate.
If you know the basic principles of Acem Meditation, guidance is less about providing information than exploring your meditation. The guide provides few answers but asks many questions. When problems arise, it is often because you have entered areas of your mind containing blindspots.
To solve the problem, you need to see more clearly, and for that you need help. "It takes two to see one." The guide's questions prompt you to look in directions that you had not thought of. In this way, guidance may become an intriguing journey of discovery for both you and the guide. At times, you may attempt to place the ball in the guide's court, in the hope that he or she will decide what to discuss.
If this happens, the guide always throws the ball back to you. It is up to you, not the guide, to define the topic of discussion. Initially, this may feel strange, but gradually, when you begin to talk about your meditation, you will find that it opens the way to further insights.
Guidance does not always produce a solution or an answer. The most important task is to become aware of where the problem lies. Meditation is a long-term process. While some problems can be solved immediately, others take longer. The ones that need more time are often more fundamental and therefore also more important.
What should you talk about in a guidance session? The basic answer is: anything that may be on your mind in relation to your meditative process. The focus may be on your meditation habits, on the way you meditate (technical guidance), on themes that emerge in the mind during long meditations (process guidance), or combinations of these.
If your meditation habits are irregular, you should probably discuss this with your guide, as it will have significant consequences for the effects of meditation. Acem recommends two half-hours of meditation every day, or alternatively one daily meditation of 45 minutes. This provides the best basis for good relaxation and long-term personal growth.
The aim of guidance is not to convince you to establish such meditation habits, but to explore why this is sometimes difficult.
The first thing is to clarify your own motivation. Not everybody wants to meditate regularly. Some people use the technique to cope with occasional stress, while others may have learnt meditation mainly to keep a friend or a relative company, and are only interested in meditating from time to time.
But even if you would like to get into the habit of regular meditation, you may still find it difficult. In such cases, the goal of meditation guidance is to discover the reasons for this difficulty, and to help you establish meditation habits that are more in accordance with your aims.
External factors have an obvious influence on people's meditation habits. Most people have a busy schedule into which they try to fit work, family, friends, household duties and leisure activities, and it may also be difficult to find the right environment for meditation.
Less obviously, irregular meditation habits may have their root in conscious or unconscious resistance. During some periods, you may manage to meditate regularly in spite of external factors; at other times resistance may take over.
Such resistance is often the result of actualisation phases during which typical patterns of behaviour manifest themselves in your meditation practice. This makes change possible, but may also feel threatening and produce resistance on your part. Even if you are completely unaware of this resistance, it can still cause you to cut down on your meditation time. You may need a meditation guide to discover that this lapse in your meditation habits is primarily due not to external factors but to your meditation. Since actualisation usually derails you from the free mental attitude, the focus of guidance may gradually shift from your habits to the way you meditate.
Some of the most important issues that come up in meditation guidance usually relate to the way people meditate.
This is less obvious than you might think. Meditators often begin their guidance session by defining their problem in terms of the spontaneous content of their meditation rather than their actual practice of the technique. They may be unable to achieve the same good feeling in meditation as before, or they feel restless, have problems relaxing, are overwhelmed by thoughts, or feel that the meditation sound fades too easily.
However, content is not the best criterion for good meditation. What you feel in meditation is much less important than how you deal with your feelings. It is more fruitful to discuss what you do when you meditate, and the guide will therefore ask questions that shift the focus to your actual practice: for instance, "When you feel restless, how does that influence your repetition of the meditation sound?"
Because such influences take place in the twilight zones of consciousness, it is not easy to answer questions like this. It may be tempting to lapse into clichés such as "I repeat the sound with a free mental attitude". But questions that deal with your meditation practice touch blindspots in the mind, and it is important to reflect on them. Gradually, it may be possible to reach a new framing of the problem, which will usually revolve around the way you meditate.
For example, you may discover that you are repeating the sound with excessive force in order to avoid being drawn into spontaneous thoughts, or that you are repressing feelings of uneasiness or restlessness because you believe that they are not a proper part of meditation. Even if this goes against the principle of the free mental attitude, you believe
- in your blindness - that you have no other choice.
When you discover that the problem lies, not in the content of your meditation, but in how you deal with it, you can begin to influence the situation. This implies a shift from a kind of passivity to an active and responsible attitude to meditation - and, subsequently, to life.
When guidance has revealed that you repeat the meditation sound in a way that makes you deviate from the free mental attitude, the next question is why. What is your inner (and maybe unconscious or semi-conscious) motivation for choosing this course? Why, for example, does it become so important to keep away spontaneous thoughts that you use excessive force in repeating the meditation sound? Perhaps the answer is that the stream of thoughts contains feelings that you wish to keep at a distance. Or perhaps the fading of the meditation sound makes you feel like a failure, and is therefore difficult to accept.
Issues like these have their origins in the psychology of the self. They raise another important question: What is the connection between your methods of dealing with meditation and with life?
The way you meditate reflects the fundamental ways you deal with existential challenges. If you attempt to avoid certain thoughts and feelings when you meditate, you may find that you tend to do the same in life. If you are caught up in an idealised way of repeating the meditation sound, you may be overly perfectionist in life as well, with a tendency to be self-critical or to compensate for low self-esteem by appearing over-confident.
Acem Meditation provides a rare opportunity to become aware of and work through such personality issues. Guidance is valuable because it stimulates these processes.
At Acem Meditation retreats featuring several consecutive days of long meditations, your spontaneous activity gradually begins to revolve around important life issues. This is particularly true of deepening retreats, where you spend more than six hours in meditation every day. In such contexts, so-called process guidance may be beneficial. In addition to discussing the way you meditate, this form of guidance also deals with the content of your meditation. You gain an opportunity to discover, explore and work through some of the life issues that have entered your mind.
In simple terms, long meditations make unconscious material semi-conscious, while talking about the same material brings it into consciousness. When you put vague thoughts into words, they gradually become clearer.
During meditation, thoughts often seem fragmentary and devoid of deeper significance. After meditation, they are easily forgotten, almost like dreams, unless you deliberately bring them back. By sharing your thoughts in a guidance group, you may discover that a thread runs through what at first seemed to be unrelated fragments. Gradually, the contours of a life issue begin to take form.
At one retreat, for instance, a participant shared some thoughts he had had during a long meditation. One of these had to do with meditation itself. The meditation sound had become quite blurred, making him suspect that he spent too little energy on it, and that the meditation guide would be critical of the way he meditated. Another thought had to do with a girl he had known in college; she was a nice girl, but at the time he felt that she wasn't pretty enough, and he didn't want others to see them together. Still another thought had to do with his job. Lately his boss had begun to complain about his inability to make independent decisions and his tendency to check every little detail with his superior. On the surface, there was no connection between these three lines of thought, but the feelings involved in all of them were actually quite similar. In meditation, in relation to the girl he once knew, in his present job, and in a number of other circumstances, he did not trust himself and relied on the judgement of others. In several long meditations, this issue returned to him in different forms, and he used the next guidance groups to share connected thoughts, feelings and associations. Little by little, he became more aware of how much weight he attached to other people's views. Gradually, he learned to trust his own judgement and be more independent.
Perceiving the links between the various fragments of your meditation is not easy. But the story illustrates how the content of your thoughts (in this case, about the girl and the boss) and the way you meditate (the blurred sound) are shaped by the same underlying psychological forces. Process guidance aims at modifying some of these forces.
Meditation guidance may take place in groups or be given individually. Each approach has its advantages.
You may contact any experienced Acem instructor for individual guidance; a session usually lasts 30-45 minutes.
Individual guidance focuses on meditation habits and technical issues. Less frequently, the focus is on the content, which may provide an opportunity for in-depth exploration of relevant issues. In individual guidance, the whole session is devoted to your meditation. The one-to-one setup makes it easier for some people to speak freely, without worrying what others might think about the things they say.
Group guidance is usually offered on courses and retreats, in special guidance groups, and after long meditations. Each session usually lasts 1-2 hours. Like individual guidance, group guidance deals with meditation habits and technical issues, but after long meditations, especially at deepening retreats, it also provides ample opportunity to discuss the content of your meditation.
In contrast to communication groups and other group psychological activities in Acem, guidance groups rarely discuss the quality of the interaction between members. Each participant is allowed to dwell on his or her own issues, without having to take the responses of others into consideration. Even so, a group process gradually evolves. What one participant brings up will often inspire others to think of related issues from their own meditation or life. Quite often, the issues raised by individual members tend to converge into a kind of group theme.
In a group, some people may find the presence of others an obstacle to discussing deeply personal issues. If this obstacle is overcome, however, group sharings have a profound effect on the members.
The goal of meditation guidance is to help you to meditate better and thereby lead a fuller and more rewarding life.
Guidance discussions focus on irregular habits, meditation problems and life issues which have yet to be worked through. The purpose is to open the mind towards higher levels of fulfilment in work and relationships.