Our subject this week is both a sequel to last month’s mystical Another World Inside This One, and part of our “Real People, Real Practice” series.
A friend recently asked: “You use the phrase ‘hold the direction’ a lot. What does that mean, practically speaking?”
Jesus wept. I’ve rewritten this post three times, and it keeps getting longer. I keep trying to explain what it means, practically speaking, to hold the direction, to stay with the practice of meditation … and I keep veering helplessly into trippy descriptions of space. Space is apparently an aspiration for me. It may not be for you. So: buyer beware.
My challenge here is to combine a practical take on what it means to stay with the practice with an overview of some of the fascinating (and mystical-sounding) ways our habit patterns get worked through, if we do, in fact, stay with it. This is because as you go deeper, the nature of what you’re staying with changes. You go from simply staying with a practice to staying with a direction.
Let’s explore. (If at any time the verbiage gets to be too much, you can declutter your mind with the guided practice!)
“Hold the direction,” my teacher Shinzen Young told me at a meditation retreat many years ago. My mind had gone quiet. I could feel a column of stillness up through the centre of my body, and then it was everywhere. I knew I was that stillness, amidst even the most gripping of life circumstances. “Hold the direction,” he said.
I tried. I tried to hold the direction, to hold on to that freedom. But after a few days, it faded. My struggles came back. The moment moved on, to wherever I was now. That’s what life does.
Rewind. In its simplest sense, “hold the direction” means doing our best to stay with the practice. Despite all of the urgencies clamouring for our attention, we aspire to more sanity or groundedness or enjoyment – whatever we’re after. So we find ten or twenty or thirty minutes to sit. As we do, as we slow down, a bit of space appears.
Not all the time, and not a lot of space. But enough. A little more breathing room, and a little more thinking room, too. This space I’m talking about is not different in kind from the space of clear reasoning, even if it’s sometimes framed as its opposite. In neurobiology, the prefrontal cortex is considered an extra circuit of connectivity between stimulus and response. An evolved capacity to pull back from knee-jerk reactions and take time to weigh options and listen to other perspectives. (That is, for those humans who actually use their prefrontal cortices. 🤯)
Meditation builds on this. It expands the space between stimulus and response. And it begins to include and clarify more elusive stimuli inside that space. We see subtle forms of reactivity and bias and contraction that we didn’t realize were motivating us, and we no longer automatically act on them. We still get lost in our old conditioned patterns (a lot!), but as we get more stability and clarity, we can catch them sooner.
That’s the primary meaning of “hold the direction.” The next sense is beginning to notice what we come back to. We notice what it feels like to have more space, more equanimity, more sanity. We notice the effect of the practice in our bodies, the ease or composure. We notice the comparative settling in our minds. And we appreciate these small changes. It’s like we’re refining our personal palette to include more delicate flavours of fulfillment and reward, more regard for simple good things.
The more we notice and appreciate this expanded baseline, the more we hold this direction, the easier it is to find our way back. Neurons that fire together, wire together. Related capacities can also be trained: more compassion, more gratitude, more focus. All this gets extra powerful when it aligns with personal values like courage, presence, patience, caring, service, and so on. They aren’t just nice ideals, they’re embodied qualities we can both feel and aspire to. We are allowed to aspire to beautiful things. In fact, we want that sense of purpose to animate our practice – that’s also what it means to hold the direction.
This is a pretty good summary of my first ten years of meditation. In fits and starts, I held the direction. And in fits and starts, I began to notice and appreciate more space and ease and gratitude, as well as more empathy for my own and other’s challenges.
All of which is more than enough.
And … It keeps going. Because that’s how attention works. Whatever we point our attention to becomes, over time, more real and more elaborated. The athlete who trains high levels of coordination; the professional naturalist who can instantly identify dozens of plant species based on tiny differences in colour and shape. The longer we pay attention, the more new subtleties and details emerge. What we pay attention to fills up our lives.
So be careful. If we only pay attention to ourselves – to our problems, our accomplishments, our possessions, our deficiencies – then that’s all we’ll be able to see. It will fill up our world. It once threatened to fill up mine. Every human has to come to their own realization around how claustrophobic – or not – that is for them.
I have a pretty liberal definition of “spiritual.” I think spiritual means paying attention to something that isn’t our worries, for so long and with such full-bodied devotion and curiosity, that eventually it opens up and we start to live there. It – whatever “it” is – begins to show us its mysteries. And the heart of that mystery is always that we’re part of something larger and more all-encompassing that we previously realized. You can find that understanding in pretty much any direction, eventually.
Paying attention to spaciousness is a recurring motif in meditation. As we focus on the space around and all through us, that space can become bigger and more generous. On the flipside, the stuff that comes up in that space – defensiveness, compulsions, habit patterns – can become less gripping. Not evenly, but as a general trend. Powerful reactions can happen and then whoosh right through us, like ghosts. Neither suppressed nor acted on, they don’t latch.
One contemplative neuroscientist I know thinks these change are related to “extinction learning:” old patterns are not erased; rather, the brain learns new safer associations that inhibit the old response. I’m not sure that quite gets at it, though – it feels more mysterious. Because there’s also a cumulative effect. As each pattern is worked out, it feels easier to work out the next one. In Indian philosophy, the belief is that the practitioner is freeing themselves from all conditioned patterns. “No karma,” say the yogis.
What direction is the meditator holding now?
It’s less a holding, now, than a being. They are being space. Being awareness. Being equanimous. Being this way is something the practitioner can notice and appreciate (but not cling to), and in the noticing and appreciating, the capacity to be more that way is reinforced. Sometimes when I meditate it feels like I’m so surrendered and loose in both mind and body that I’m empty and transparent. Another friend calls it “burning clean.” My old teacher Shinzen calls it “the taste of purification.”
This is where meditation instructions to notice yourself as that open empty space of awareness may start to make sense. Thoughts and sensory percepts come and go – effortlessly, without clinging or coagulation – but the space they dance in stays the same. That space is alive, says the Dzogchen teacher, and it is you.
The relief here can be profound. Space can’t be hurt by hard feelings or situations any more than the open sky can be scratched by a passing cloud. It’s like “Ohmigod, I’m actually going to be ok.” This shitshow of hurt and alienation and fear is not actually our fate, however many nineteenth-century novels we may have read in college. The knees shake with gratitude. As resistance falls away, so does so much secondary suffering. By returning again and again to this understanding, our sense of what’s possible can begin to shift.
I’ve focussed on the purification aspect, or what’s taken away. I could have equally focused on what’s revealed: connectivity, luminosity, spontaneity, intimacy, creativity, love, aliveness. Some practitioners (much further along than me) say they even experience time and space differently, more as properties of human cognition than of the world “out there.” As the warp and weft of regular consciousness changes, various conventional pieties about the nature of self and world also change.
What does “hold the direction” mean now?
It means the same thing now as it did when we started. It means coming back to practice. It means paying more attention to good things, including transcendent properties not found in the senses, and less attention on what creates grasping and alienation and misery,
The reason I feel a bit conflicted about describing all this space stuff isn’t only because I know this direction won’t interest everyone. It’s also because if it does interest someone, then the description itself can be misleading. It turns subtle shifts into special Things that someone then imagines they either have or don’t have. But it’s not like that. All the above can be true for someone in a low-key way, without them ever fetishizing it, or even experiencing it as unusual. That’s because for most people, meditative change is a gradual, lifelong process we live inside. Unless we can jump between our pre-meditation nervous systems and our 20-years-of-practice-later nervous system, we never notice a big contrast. And even if we do have some experience that feels important – like I had on that Shinzen retreat – the peak subsides. We can never revisit any previous moment. Each moment is unique. That’s what’s so magical about them.
I’ve had many meaningful spiritual experiences over the years. Some pass in moments, others over weeks and months. But I always come back down. At some point I realized that wanting to get back to some previous state was all about me, and paying attention to myself just wasn’t that interesting. On the other hand, wanting to keep growing and learning, wanting to continue to move deeper into mystery and love and service – whatever that may look like – that feels like a direction worth staying with.
Practically speaking, then, “hold the direction” means aspiring to something beautiful in our relationship with life. It means noticing and appreciating how practice is deepening in our actual unique experience, not anyone else’s. And it means staying with what our experience has shown us to be true, independent of changing conditions.
At some point, if we practice with enough confidence and patience and curiosity, we may even discover we’re no longer holding the direction at all. The direction is holding us. It’s moving us towards a freedom that’s innate to who we are, a freedom that doesn’t change. Unshakable truth.
Here’s a meditation about holding the direction, edited from Thursday’s live Home Base Hangout (full 25-minute version here). I appreciate this community so much. We aim for good things together.
Love,
Jeff
A few quick notes—
The next Do Nothing Project (DNP) live meditation is Sunday, September 27 at 8pm EDT. Link here. Replays are archived Monday mornings on Home Base and YouTube.
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Many thanks!
Where Meditation Leads
Northern District Library, Toronto and online via Zoom
Sunday, November 29, 1-4 pm ET
Where does meditation practice lead? Over the course of this afternoon retreat, Jeff will lead practices and discussion into how meditation can help us drop from the turbulent surface layer of mind and circumstance, into the deeper stream of life just happening. This kind of awareness is both ordinary and sacred, and available to anyone at any time.
