The following Reddit question landed in my inbox, and I couldn’t resist writing a long answer. I thought I’d paste it here, in case it’s of general interest.
The question
If I spend entire meditation sessions only aware of the fact that I can’t focus, would that be enough?
I get incredibly restless and frustrated that I can’t enter a deep focus, even when I sit for a long time I often fail. The deepest insight I can attain is merely the fact that I can’t focus. Is this progress? It doesn’t feel like it…
My response
It’s not failure, it’s great! You’re directly coming into contact with the truth of Anatta (non-self, no absolute control, etc.) and the suffering that comes from clinging on to the idea that you should have a kind of control over your mind that you don’t!
Most suffering in life comes from indignantly grasping for a kind of control that we don’t actually have. Or otherwise insisting the world be different from how it is. You’re in contact with the core of what the Buddha taught on the cause of suffering & its solution! Naturally seeing how this grasping leads to suffering will incline the mind to relinquish it. Just as if we noticed our hand was on a stove and that that’s what was causing the burning pain! The whole of the spiritual path is this as far as I can tell. As we see and become aware of more, we hit ourselves less.
All that said, some practical advice: The quality and consistency of your focus matters far more than the quantity. Being with the breath completely for 10 breaths will genuinely do you more good than being with it haphazardly for an hour. This is counterintuitive, but the mechanism is the same as with habit streaks. When you break a streak on a habit, it’s like the habit shatters. But when the streak is active, the habit is fairly solid, automatic, etc. It’s the same with the breath. You’re building a habit of paying attention to the breath exclusively. If this is genuinely all you’re doing, the brain will learn the “habit” extremely quickly!
I cannot stress enough, quality matters more than quantity. Forget how long you’re meditating. Measure progress by how deeply you can be with the breath! Tune into anything smooth, flowy, nice, continuous, and measure progress by the depth and continuity of that. You can see how you’re doing live, while you’re meditating, every few seconds! It can be the same as a videogame practiced like this, with the right attitude of course :) (our attitude also being something we can’t always control. anatta!)
Now, the restlessness and frustration you feel, this is too much trying. There’s a teaching (AN 6.55) where the Buddha makes this exact point. You need to tune the amount of effort like you’d tune an instrument.
An important kind of this tuning is becoming better at discerning the different kinds of desire/trying. Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of desire. tanha-desire (unwholesome desire, grasping desire, thirsty desire, push desire) and chanda-desire (wholesome desire, interest, you’re “pulled to it”, you “want to do it”). Better understanding what causes chanda-desire, and what causes tanha-desire, and how you can tell them apart, is a huge part of practice. In some ways, all of practice. If we could see, with total clarity, the effects our wholesome vs. unwholesome desires had, we would naturally reject the unwholesome for the wholesome, just as you’d take your hand off a hot stove after seeing how it’s burning you (see MN 19 for more.)
Back to my meditation retreat now. It’s wrapping up, so I checked my email and got sniped by this question. Oops! I hope it’s helpful though ❤️
Best of luck, may we both become evermore happy & free!
PS: Highly recommend “A path with heart” for a book on meditation & the whole spiritual path! It’s incredibly wholesome and healing even just to read. And extremely deep! Far deeper than I currently know haha :D