Why You Shouldn't Use Recorded Meditation Guidance

Hello,

So I'm going to talk for a few minutes about guided meditation and why you shouldn't use it,

Or rather why you shouldn't overuse it.

Nowadays silent meditation,

Done on your own without guidance,

Is sometimes referred to as self-guided meditation,

Presumably because we see guided meditation as the default.

And this is quite strange really,

Because meditation has been around for a very long time,

At least 2,

000 years,

And for almost all of that time there was no such thing as guided meditation.

What happened was that the meditation teacher would give instructions to the student,

Often quite brief,

And the student would go away and follow them on their own,

Sometimes for a very long time.

They might go away to a cave for months on end before they came back to report on their experience and get some more instructions.

But then from about 40 years ago people started to do guided meditations,

And now it's become so popular that it's become the norm.

And I would think that most meditation today is probably done to recorded guidance.

And in some ways this is fantastic,

Because I think it's helping meditation to spread and to be accessible to people who wouldn't otherwise try it or wouldn't stick with it,

But I also think it's causing some problems.

And so when I'm teaching people to meditate I advise them to use the guidance to get to grips with a particular practice,

To get the instructions,

And then to drop it and do it in silence.

So why am I doing that?

Well there are two reasons.

The first one is that the recorded guidance makes meditation easier and more pleasant,

And oddly enough this is a problem.

It's helpful in that it keeps you doing it whereas otherwise you might quit,

But the problem is that it's easier and more pleasant because it helps you to stay focused on the meditation,

Stops you getting distracted.

Again that might not seem like such a bad thing,

But actually it is,

Because it's that process of getting distracted and over time learning to not be quite so distracted that gives us the first major benefit of meditation,

Which is the development of mindfulness.

Meditation gives you lots of things but the first thing it gives you is this one.

You get better at noticing when your mind's wandered and coming back to the meditation,

And then that helps you in your life outside because you get better at noticing when you're lost in thought and coming back to the present moment.

But if you've got someone talking in your ear throughout the meditation you don't really have to do that work for yourself because they keep bringing you back to the meditation.

So it's a bit like having stabilizers on a bike.

It does help you to balance,

In this analogy concentrating on the meditation is balancing,

But of course if you never take the stabilizers off you don't learn how to balance for yourself,

And when you do take them off you find you can't balance and it's a struggle.

And it's a bit like that with meditation.

You can spend a long time meditating to recorded guidance and enjoying yourself and getting certain benefits from it,

But then when you take away the recorded guidance you'll find you don't have that much ability to stay focused on the meditation by yourself because the guidance was doing it for you.

And you really really want to develop that ability because that is what will start to help you in your daily life to not be so lost in thought and not controlled by your thoughts.

So in fact the difficulty of meditating in silence is exactly the sign that you're doing something worth doing.

So that was the first benefit of meditating in silence,

Developing more mindfulness.

The second one is more about learning how meditation works and learning how to do it in a skilled,

Considered manner.

So you could see meditation as being a bit like a craft.

You've got tools to use,

Different techniques,

Different meditative techniques,

We can think of them as tools,

And then with each tool you can use it in different ways.

You can apply a bit more pressure,

A bit less,

You can move it this way,

You can move it that way.

You've got a lot of different variables to play with when you're meditating.

But if you're listening to recorded guidance you won't really learn how to play with those variables,

With those different tools.

You may not even know they exist.

The guidance is telling you to do all this stuff but you don't know why.

It says let's start with a few counting a few breaths.

Okay,

Fine,

But I don't know why I'm doing it.

Okay,

Now we're doing a few breaths feeling the whole body.

Great,

Still don't know why.

I'm being told to be curious.

Okay,

That sounds nice,

But why?

I don't know.

I could go away and read a book on meditation,

I might get some idea,

But even then I don't have a felt sense of what all these different little techniques and different tweaks on the techniques are doing,

And of how I personally respond to them.

And I really need to learn that.

To become a more proficient meditator I need to start to grasp a range of meditative tools,

Different ways of using them,

And how those are going to work for me,

How those are going to affect me as an individual,

Rather than just some average meditator who the recorded guidance was done for.

And of course when you do it on your own this is what you have to start doing.

So to give you an example,

How does this work?

It means that,

Okay,

You're a bit distracted in your meditation.

So now you do move to counting a few breaths.

Okay,

Still a bit distracted.

Well now let's try counting backwards,

Because that's a little harder and creates more of a need for concentration.

Hmm,

But actually I feel like now maybe I'm making a bit too much effort.

I'm straining,

I'm tightening up,

And that's actually stirring up more thoughts.

Perhaps I'll try and relax a bit more.

But maybe there's a bit of self-criticism that's crept in about the distraction.

Oh dear,

I'm a bad meditator.

Okay,

Well I know that I find it quite beneficial in these moments to generate a little bit of kindness towards myself.

And I've played around with that technique in various different ways.

So I know that for me the optimal way to generate kindness is to imagine myself breathing in kindness on the in-breath.

So now I do that.

And now,

Oh look,

I have managed to settle my mind a little bit and now I'm ready to proceed with my meditation.

But all of that,

The ability to use those techniques and know which ones work for you and when,

Can only come about through playing with them yourself rather than just having someone else tell you what to do moment by moment without ever knowing why they're telling you any particular thing.

So meditate without guidance and over time you can become a skilled crafts person.

So hopefully you're getting some idea of why you might wish to meditate in silence at least some of the time.

But I do want to emphasize that meditation,

Recorded meditation guidance,

Is not all bad.

If it starts you off,

That's great.

If it keeps you going when you otherwise wouldn't,

That's great.

If it gets you to meditate at a time when you just don't feel like it,

That's great.

I know experienced meditators,

Skilled meditators,

Who like to put on a recorded meditation at the end of the day when they're a bit tired because it would be too much effort to do it all themselves.

That's no problem at all.

And you shouldn't feel bound by anything I'm saying because meditation is a very individual personal thing and it doesn't work the same for everyone and so the advice I'm giving might not apply to you.

But for what it's worth,

Here is my specific advice.

When you're learning a new meditation technique or style of meditation,

You might want to use guidance initially to understand that technique.

Once you've grasped it,

You can let go of it.

If you are used to meditating to guidance and you're interested in what I'm saying and you want to move to silence,

Then dropping it cold turkey might be a bit difficult.

You might find it so hard to concentrate that you don't want to do it.

Of course you can just persevere.

It will get easier.

But alternatively you can find guidance that is a bit sparser than what you've been using and wean yourself off that way.

So find some tracks where there's a bit more silence.

I think actually Headspace does this.

It has some sort of option for doing this.

Slowly reduce it and then let go of it.

In fact of course some of my meditation guidance is quite like this.

It is a bit sparser than a lot of what you will hear so you could try some of mine as a stepping stone.

But finally,

Most importantly,

This is always the bottom line.

Find out what's good for you and do that.