// essays //
May 18, 2015
Skeptical Meditation
Stephanie Goldstein
I would call myself a skeptic. I am not easily convinced by arguments that I cannot verify and because of this, I have struggled to appreciate perspectives that are grounded more in subjective experiences than in cold facts. This has been a troubling way to approach my own life, because my appreciation for—and perhaps more aptly stated, my dependence on—objectivity is particularly unrealistic for dealing with aspects of life that are not easily or ever explained. As my graduation approaches, I struggle to explain what the world will look for me as an adult, how I feel about leaving my student life behind, and what career will make me most happy. Judaism has had a similar effect on me, enabling me to feel closer to others and more hopeful about my future, but ultimately frustrating me when I cannot explain the rationale behind many of its beliefs or traditions. The influences of this dilemma on my life are many, and will not be addressed here. But I will, however, address how I came nearer to accepting uncertainty, and how accepting things I cannot verify or even explain has helped me to have faith—in Judaism and in myself post-college. I gained this acceptance through meditation.
Located in Chelsea, the Shambhala Meditation Center offered a beginner’s meditation course, which seemed perfect for my beginner’s needs. The class description catered to an intrigued but primarily skeptical audience, promising a structured environment without any boastful guarantees of meditation’s supposed life-transformative powers. Although I would have liked to, I did not expect to walk out of the class hearing birds chirping and seeing rainbows, and the meditation center, to its credit, did not promote that expectation either.
Inside the meditation center, I closed my eyes. I could no longer see the pastel-pink room I was sitting in, the elaborate bronze bowls behind the glass display before the class, or the instructor, resting cross-legged atop his satin, pink pillow. I heard the voice of my instructor guiding our attention to our breathing. He instructed each of us to focus on the coolness of our breath entering our body and of the warmth leaving as it exits. Concentrating on my breath was difficult. I could not guarantee that this exercise was going to make me feel better about my future, and I certainly couldn’t expect immediate results. I had to trust in a process that could not ensure that my expectations were met. I had to trust in an unknown and resist an inclination, which until that point, had convinced me that something like this simply would just not work.
And then, suddenly, I stopped caring about how stupid I felt—or how irrational meditation seemed to me. I kept my eyes closed but I opened my mind.
We continued to progress through three meditative practices, each of us relying on the instructor to concentrate our thoughts on physical sensations—on breathing, on our interconnectedness with others, on our relationship with a higher but not necessarily divine power. I felt something. It wasn’t relaxation, happiness, or joy—but perhaps just a moment of quiet.
After leaving the meditation center, I began to wonder if my first experience meditating gave me more than just a moment of mental rest. Because I had some previous exposure to Kabbalah-inspired artwork and its emphasis on spiritual growth on a recent trip to Israel, I began to look towards Kabbalistic beliefs on meditation in an attempt to understand if I could enrich an aspect of my life I had until that point neglected: my relationship with what I could not confirm.
I found that my experience in Chelsea differed from traditional Jewish meditative practices because of the absence of one element: God. Jewish Kabbalistic theory explores how to enhance a person’s relationship with God, and there are several forms of Jewish meditation that help the meditator to incorporate God into his meditative practices, including Hitbodedut, Hitbonenut, Hishtavut, and Musar. Whereas Hitbodedut and Hitbonenut focus closely on bringing a person nearer to God, Hishtavut and Musar concentrate on how an individual interacts with the world around him and how his relationship with the world can be enhanced through feelings of happiness and fulfillment. Because my initial interest in meditation was bent on personal empowerment—enabling myself to live a life enriched by prioritizing my relationships with others—I became particularly interested in Musar through its emphasis on the meditator’s relationship with the external world and those who bring him joy.
Duties of the Heart by Rabbi Bachye bar Joseph explains Musar’s founding premise: when meditating, a person should define the essence of who he is as his soul. Bachye bar Joseph defines the objective of meditation as motivating a person’s soul to feel and emanate loving feelings—and that this love is created only through aligning our own desires with God’s. He urges the meditator to realize “in thought and mind and deed the will of God,” which will enable us to “attune ... the soul into such perfect harmony with God, that all right conduct and right thought must follow without effort on our part, because our will is one with His, through love.” Bachye bar Joseph’s beliefs are founded in the idea that through framing our own desires as God’s desires as well, we position ourselves to live right lives, encompassed with decisions made with virtue and goodness.
Accepting God’s will as our own both removes suffering derived from the external world and enables us to create an internal world of love. Because of the meditator’s “restfulness of his soul and the liberty of his mind, and in the diminution of his anxieties in regard to worldly affairs,” he can be “compared to an alchemist who knows how to turn silver into gold and brass and tin to silver.” In other words, Bachye bar Joseph was getting at the fact that we are able to avoid negative emotions and interactions with others through seeking out and adopting what God wants for us. Although I am admittedly still confused as to what God’s desires entail—and, to be honest, I am not sure whether I entirely buy his argument and promises for a loving life—I am confident that bar Joseph’s conception of meditation is a meaningful aid in trying to live with a greater sense of what it means to live well.
Although I do not necessarily subscribe to Bachye bar Joseph’s ideas, I do believe in happiness, and that is what unites my experience in Chelsea with Jewish meditative practices. Although the meditative class I attended emphasized happiness’s relation to my own agency and Joseph’s emphasized its contingency on God’s agency, the ultimate goal of meditation is clear to me: to live life well, regardless of particular belief systems. Meditation gave me the tools to face a future that frightened me. I am becoming an adult, and I know that in some small way meditation is helping me to do so. It gave me a moment of peace—a moment in which I could acknowledge that I did not understand much about my own life or about Judaism, but also that perhaps that does not matter. Regardless of my uncertainty, I can close my eyes, listen to my breath, and feel as if this moment of uncertainty is beautiful, a moment in which I can trust in myself in more deeply than I ever had before.
Located in Chelsea, the Shambhala Meditation Center offered a beginner’s meditation course, which seemed perfect for my beginner’s needs. The class description catered to an intrigued but primarily skeptical audience, promising a structured environment without any boastful guarantees of meditation’s supposed life-transformative powers. Although I would have liked to, I did not expect to walk out of the class hearing birds chirping and seeing rainbows, and the meditation center, to its credit, did not promote that expectation either.
Inside the meditation center, I closed my eyes. I could no longer see the pastel-pink room I was sitting in, the elaborate bronze bowls behind the glass display before the class, or the instructor, resting cross-legged atop his satin, pink pillow. I heard the voice of my instructor guiding our attention to our breathing. He instructed each of us to focus on the coolness of our breath entering our body and of the warmth leaving as it exits. Concentrating on my breath was difficult. I could not guarantee that this exercise was going to make me feel better about my future, and I certainly couldn’t expect immediate results. I had to trust in a process that could not ensure that my expectations were met. I had to trust in an unknown and resist an inclination, which until that point, had convinced me that something like this simply would just not work.
And then, suddenly, I stopped caring about how stupid I felt—or how irrational meditation seemed to me. I kept my eyes closed but I opened my mind.
We continued to progress through three meditative practices, each of us relying on the instructor to concentrate our thoughts on physical sensations—on breathing, on our interconnectedness with others, on our relationship with a higher but not necessarily divine power. I felt something. It wasn’t relaxation, happiness, or joy—but perhaps just a moment of quiet.
After leaving the meditation center, I began to wonder if my first experience meditating gave me more than just a moment of mental rest. Because I had some previous exposure to Kabbalah-inspired artwork and its emphasis on spiritual growth on a recent trip to Israel, I began to look towards Kabbalistic beliefs on meditation in an attempt to understand if I could enrich an aspect of my life I had until that point neglected: my relationship with what I could not confirm.
I found that my experience in Chelsea differed from traditional Jewish meditative practices because of the absence of one element: God. Jewish Kabbalistic theory explores how to enhance a person’s relationship with God, and there are several forms of Jewish meditation that help the meditator to incorporate God into his meditative practices, including Hitbodedut, Hitbonenut, Hishtavut, and Musar. Whereas Hitbodedut and Hitbonenut focus closely on bringing a person nearer to God, Hishtavut and Musar concentrate on how an individual interacts with the world around him and how his relationship with the world can be enhanced through feelings of happiness and fulfillment. Because my initial interest in meditation was bent on personal empowerment—enabling myself to live a life enriched by prioritizing my relationships with others—I became particularly interested in Musar through its emphasis on the meditator’s relationship with the external world and those who bring him joy.
Duties of the Heart by Rabbi Bachye bar Joseph explains Musar’s founding premise: when meditating, a person should define the essence of who he is as his soul. Bachye bar Joseph defines the objective of meditation as motivating a person’s soul to feel and emanate loving feelings—and that this love is created only through aligning our own desires with God’s. He urges the meditator to realize “in thought and mind and deed the will of God,” which will enable us to “attune ... the soul into such perfect harmony with God, that all right conduct and right thought must follow without effort on our part, because our will is one with His, through love.” Bachye bar Joseph’s beliefs are founded in the idea that through framing our own desires as God’s desires as well, we position ourselves to live right lives, encompassed with decisions made with virtue and goodness.
Accepting God’s will as our own both removes suffering derived from the external world and enables us to create an internal world of love. Because of the meditator’s “restfulness of his soul and the liberty of his mind, and in the diminution of his anxieties in regard to worldly affairs,” he can be “compared to an alchemist who knows how to turn silver into gold and brass and tin to silver.” In other words, Bachye bar Joseph was getting at the fact that we are able to avoid negative emotions and interactions with others through seeking out and adopting what God wants for us. Although I am admittedly still confused as to what God’s desires entail—and, to be honest, I am not sure whether I entirely buy his argument and promises for a loving life—I am confident that bar Joseph’s conception of meditation is a meaningful aid in trying to live with a greater sense of what it means to live well.
Although I do not necessarily subscribe to Bachye bar Joseph’s ideas, I do believe in happiness, and that is what unites my experience in Chelsea with Jewish meditative practices. Although the meditative class I attended emphasized happiness’s relation to my own agency and Joseph’s emphasized its contingency on God’s agency, the ultimate goal of meditation is clear to me: to live life well, regardless of particular belief systems. Meditation gave me the tools to face a future that frightened me. I am becoming an adult, and I know that in some small way meditation is helping me to do so. It gave me a moment of peace—a moment in which I could acknowledge that I did not understand much about my own life or about Judaism, but also that perhaps that does not matter. Regardless of my uncertainty, I can close my eyes, listen to my breath, and feel as if this moment of uncertainty is beautiful, a moment in which I can trust in myself in more deeply than I ever had before.
// STEPHANIE GOLDSTEIN is a Senior in Barnard College and a Senior Editor for The Current. She can be reached at [email protected]. Photo courtesy of www.innerhealing.com.