Post #52: Lucky Streaks

25 July 2023

Meditation streaks are wonderful! (And of course they are about a lot more than luck.) Unfortunately they are also confoundedly difficult for ordinary mortals to keep up for any considerable length of time—meaning months or years of sitting the prescribed number of daily hours in the prescribed manner. So much so that one may wonder whether luck doesn’t come into it after all…

What do I mean by a streak? Much will depend on how you define the required daily regimen, which, while not altogether arbitrary, is certainly open to a measure of negotiation. In a Vipassana context, the guidelines are pretty clear: a committed practice requires one full hour of sitting in the morning and one at night. Not that such rules of thumb are canonical or set in stone, except perhaps in the subculture around Goenka, which is why, for many years, I resisted their unpalatable rigidity—only to confirm in the end, for myself at any rate, that the prescribed dosage really does work best.

Piecing your hours together until you’ve reached the required 120 minutes by the end of the day is not bad, so far as negotiations go, but things happen in the second half of the regulation sixty minutes that you never get to if you sit for thirty minutes four times a day, say. Shifting your hours around in the day is also better than neglecting them, but unfailing regularity helps greatly with strengthening the force of habit that is necessary to make the exercise more sustainable. Starting and finishing the day with sittings is likewise very helpful, as is not letting much more than twelve hours elapse between sessions—all this not because some unwritten law in the skies says so, but because it will make your practice more effective as well as easier to maintain. Which is no mere afterthought because keeping things going, day-in day-out, relentlessly and without exception, is probably the greatest challenge of all on the Path, along with the everyday puzzle of how to integrate the high and the low roads in one life. The only thing harder is getting the regularity back once you’ve dropped the ball, when often a single fumble is enough to send you back to square one.

The key to the whole thing, apart from establishing as much regularity as possible, is to reduce the element of choice. If you give yourself a chance to think about whether you should do an unwelcome sitting or not, you may very well decide not to; if you entertain thoughts of whether you like sitting while you are doing it, you are already half-way towards giving up and getting up. There are, almost certainly, more enjoyable things to be doing, or at least they will appear so at the moment. If it weren’t so, then keeping up your practice would be easy and the whole vexatious problem would disappear. There may be some lucky meditators for whom this is the case. But I am not one of them.

I count myself lucky whenever I manage to sustain so much as a full hour on the mat. If I can do both prescribed hours in a day, it’s a festive occasion; if I can go further and keep it going for several days in a row, then lo, it’s a season of glad tidings and joy! Not that life suddenly changes its color all around, mind you. The sittings get a little easier, but the challenge remains. The overall tone and tint of life should become friendlier, but by tiny increments only. When one can stay with a streak for a few months, however, strange turns of fortune can happen, sometimes quite momentous ones, that make one wonder whether serious enough meditation may not, after all, confer magical powers of a kind that the rational mind is normally disposed to file away under folk beliefs and silly superstitions. Surely the whole world will not realign itself around someone just because he is keeping his appointments on the mat—or will it?

Take the curious circumstances around how I got my current job. When it suddenly appeared at a critical juncture in my life, practically out of the blue—a godsend if ever there was one—it so happened that I had just completed my first three-month streak in a decade. A mere coincidence, you may say, and you may be right; but even so, it still looks meaningful and suggestive to me, though I can also see how it might be no more than the pattern-seeking human mind discerning faces in the clouds. I am not proposing, even for mere argument’s sake, that I can imagine any remotely plausible causal connection between my meditation and the job suddenly becoming available, with all the specifications I had been looking for in vain for so long. I am not arguing the case for anything as ambitious as Jungian “synchronicity” here; I am merely struck by the coincidence, and I wonder how it might fit with Buddhist ideas of karma that I don’t understand very well either. If there are mysterious magnetic forces at work behind how things arrange themselves in life, I don’t pretend to understand them; all I can say is that meditation streaks can make it feel as if such forces were in operation, and as if one could, by one’s efforts, arrive at a much more favorable and satisfactory position in relation to them.

If the world feels as if it were rearranging itself around a robust meditation practice, it is probably because one perceives things differently against such a mental backdrop, not because there has been any external readjustment. But who would doubt that these shifts of perspective can be immensely powerful? They may not in fact change the world at large, but they can certainly change the world we must inhabit experientially. How benign the world really is—meditation or no meditation—remains very much open to doubt; but so long as one does not veer into delusion, a friendlier-looking world makes for better living, I would say. And keeping the meditation going can definitely help one arrive at a cheerier outlook, even within clear sight of the noble truths.

To those already convinced, this will be nothing new, and to those who are not, it will give little reason to change their minds. But I’m not hoping to change anyone’s mind, just to share my experience with meditation streaks, among other things. For me it is not in doubt that if I could only keep those sittings going, a lot of other issues would resolve themselves. To some problems I would find better solutions; others I would be able to tolerate better; still others I could perhaps learn to accept at least grudgingly. Life would not be magically transformed into a bed of roses; but I could stay clear of more thorns and deal better with the ones that prick me anyway. And all this at the “cost” of two hours a day that I can spare—no more than a determined gym rat might invest daily in far less comprehensive, though more visible, results.

Why not stay the course, then? Well, that’s just what I am asking myself too. Nietzsche held, as Frankl liked to repeat, that with the right Why in life one can put up with any How. But where does that leave me, when my Why does not brook much doubt anymore on this question, not after more than fifteen years of challenging it from every angle I could think of. The two hours are plainly necessary, not just for my wellbeing, but for my very sanity in life: they put the anchor down not just spiritually, but emotionally and practically, and they will get me through if anything can. I really do believe that, on the strength of what looks to me like the strongest possible confirmation by personal experience. I would not prescribe it to anyone, but for me, the conclusion has become inescapable.

Since I arrived at that conclusion and made my peace, in principle at least, with what had long seemed like an overly stringent formula (I can pinpoint, almost to a day, when I came around, not quite four years ago), my conviction has not wavered—but my practice has continued wobbling. How is this possible after so many years, so many thousands of hours on the mat? I wish I understood, but I really don’t. Some weakness of will, I suppose, even though I am capable of quite a bit of self-discipline. Not enough, it appears, and maybe it doesn’t even have to be. Maybe the very fact that the journey remains such a struggle contributes to making it precious and meaningful. I’m not saying that it is so, only that it is possible.

It would be nice to think that this seventeenth day of my latest streak is but the beginning of the next 10,000 or so of steadfast progress, both feet firmly planted on the Path (two daily hours and all), sustained without fail to the day of my eventual demise, by which time (hope springs eternal in the human breast) I may have arrived at a view of things that should make it easier to say my good-byes. There is little in the record of the past few years to suggest that I will indeed be able to persist in quite so stalwart a manner; but the past is no reliable predictor of the future, only a very approximate guide. So there is always a chance, small but real, that “this time it will be different.” I should be so lucky. Alas, it seems far more likely that the silken thread—so formidable in relation to the spinner, so flimsy and fragile from a higher vantage point—will break as it has broken so many times before, and send me back once more to starting again, and again, and again…