Post #59: Meditedium or Dhamma Dullness

28 August 2023

It’s not supposed to happen, but sometimes it does anyway: you haven’t lost faith in the practice, exactly, or been overcome by outright aversion (as in Dhamma Blowback, Post #12); nor are you facing a full-fledged Dhamma Meltdown (Post #25) that might destroy your sittings altogether or reduce them to meditorture on the mat. It’s just that sometimes, possibly for no discernible reason, the energy goes right out of your sittings; from one day to the next, you find yourself bored and unable to focus properly, and not very interested in what you are observing. You may still be able to do keep your appointments with the mat and stretch them to ten or twenty minutes (or perhaps even the full hour), but you cannot help getting up with a sense of dissatisfaction. Mission not accomplished. Welcome to meditedium.

Perhaps it makes more sense to describe this deplorably unmeditative turn by what does not happen in it (Post #24): the lights never go on, the sun never rises properly, and one ambles about the shadowlands, a kind of mental Stockholm in January—nothing terribly wrong, but nothing very right either. All colors agree in the dark, as Francis Bacon wrote in his Essays, but not on the most cheerful or engrossing terms. Thus a kind of late autumn or early winter season in one's practice; not freezing the bones with biting frost or icy winds, but enough drab and dreary scenes all around to make you forget, after a few weeks in this unedifying state, that you ever had a more verdant practice before, or that you will ever have one again.

To unroll this phenomenon a little, one might start by saying that even a ten-minute or twenty-minute practice is nothing to scoff at, provided it can be kept up with a measure of regularity and a modicum of good cheer. It can even be a beautiful, unforced way to practice that yields, in some cases, impressive results. I’ve seen such practices go on happily for a whole year or so until the attempt at a first retreat intervened and messed everything up by taking the relaxation and the fun out, destroying someone’s fledgling practice rather than enhancing it. Nonetheless, if the full-hour practice has become your beau ideal—however difficult it may be to attain, perhaps that always goes with such ideals—it must be admitted that there is, quite inescapably, something disappointing about the twenty-minute regimen, even apart from the plain reality that there are places you can only get to—I mean for clean-up, not for great revelations and epiphanies—in the second twenty minutes, and the third.

One might be tempted to pass off this dull phase as evidence of desirelessness, as if it marked the attainment of a more detached practice. It’s possible, but it sounds a little feeble to me. There’s nothing in this state, as I’ve know it anyway, that is particularly conducive to keeping one’s practice going, or that looks worth cultivating to me. But desirelessness nonetheless comes into it, not so much by way of sugar-coating the weak stretches in one’s practice as by the way one responds to such an unwelcome situation. The winter season may be as inevitable as the spring or winter, but it certainly isn’t as fruitful; that should be accepted without evasion. But even a barren practice is better than none, and the measure of one’s progress is not the episodes one goes through, but the equanimity with which one is able to meet them, to marshal one’s energies, and to keep going through dry and cold spells as well as lusher and warmer ones. The winter, too, brings its enjoyments to those who know where to find them.

No doubt it would be better if one could stop expecting anything of one’s practice, or maybe of one’s life; then everything good that comes one’s way would exceed one’s expectations and figure as something extra. Sounds quite promising, but I confess that I see no way to get my ornery mind into such an advances state of appreciation. Perhaps I just have not suffered enough yet. So my strategy would be to wait the winter out, not with great joy, but with as much acceptance of the inevitable as I can muster.

Sometimes these episodic downturns happen because there are more pressing things going on in other departments of one’s life, which brings its own compensations; so much the worse when there is a sense of generalized boredom that spreads to your practice too. Nothing to be done then but to enjoy your boredom, if you can. (At such times you may find it helpful to focus your sittings on the evening sessions; they are a fabulous alternative to sleeping pills sometimes.)

All else failing, fall back on Winston Churchill’s supposed mantra and keep buggering on with bulldog determination until the thaw finally sets in, the weather gets milder again, and the green shoots come back for the next spring season in your practice…