Editor:
My heart goes out to Sarah Blackstone-Fredericks (“How to Meditate When the World is on Fire,” Jan 15), with her multiple (17!) moves, and I applaud her for finding peace of mind by creating a safe space wherever she found herself.
So while I found myself agreeing with most of her heartfelt essay on meditation, I got hung up when she wrote, “The goal is to find a little peace within… .” My belief is, for most people, having a goal in meditation is not only counterproductive (in this case, finding peace of mind) but can turn folks away from meditation when, after a few sessions, they haven’t found what they were hoping for. I speak from experience. As a one-time instructor for beginning meditators at a Bay Area Zen group, I shudder to think how many people I turned off the practice by setting up such high expectations. (Only one in four or five ever returned after their first session.)
Of course, for some, having a goal does work! But we’re all different, and meditation isn’t a “one-size-fits-all” practice. The late Zen monk Kobun Chino expressed it so well when he explained that “hard sitting” (having a goal, putting effort into it) is perfect for some people. For the rest of us, “soft sitting” (that is, just sitting without a goal, trusting that one’s mind knows best) is the ticket. Or as the Buddhist Heart Sutra says, “… no place to go, nothing to do, nothing to attain.”
Barry Evans, Eureka
This article appears in After the Flooding.