Meditation Unleashed: Going Beyond Mindfulness for Greater Insight and Transformation
Western Mindfulness meditation is a solid foundation, opening a world of additional possibilities.
When you were a toddler, you learned to walk. It’s a foundational skill required for nearly every physical activity you engage in. Once you learned to walk, you were able to learn to run, jump, and perform gymnastics, and you had greater freedom to move about in your environment.
Mindfulness meditation is similar. It’s a foundational skill that you can build on to improve athletic performance, increase personal productivity, acquire mental disciplines to improve your emotional life and engage in spiritual practices.
Without mindfulness, any activity you want to do becomes more difficult. Your mind wanders, and improvement is slow, assuming you remain interested in anything for very long.
What you can accomplish with mindfulness mastery
As with any foundational skill, it’s difficult to provide a comprehensive list of what can be built upon it. The only limitations are desire, creativity, and disciplined practice.
Below are four areas that have been my focus for many years. These activities bring me joy and benefits that make my life satisfying.
Games and sports performance
I’ve always enjoyed games. When I was young, I was obsessed with winning, and games became an ego trap for me, but despite my unwholesome motivation, I learned to develop concentration skills, and I learned the value of diligent practice to acquire game mastery.
I have been playing golf since I was nine years old. Golf is a mirror into your mind, a rare game where the only real opponent is yourself. The score you tally reflects the physical skills and mental disciplines you develop.
When I was a teenager, I enjoyed spending time in the practice area. I would hit ball after ball working to improve my precision and consistency. I still do that today. In fact, it’s a key component of my spiritual practice.
As a teenager, I noticed that when I spent hours hitting golf balls, my billiards play improved. Even without practice, I could make several consecutive balls, and I was very competitive.
My skills in billiards improved, not due to practicing billiards, but because my concentration skills were honed by practicing golf. That was when I realized that concentration was a skill transferable to other areas.
Personal Productivity
When I was in college, after screwing around for the first two years and earning mediocre grades, I was challenged to see if I could perform at “A” level. My ego couldn’t accept the reality posted on my report cards.
When I eliminated my superfluous, time-wasting activities and devoted myself to reading, studying, and memorizing course material, I found my mind regained the concentration powers I remembered from high school sports.
After obtaining a 4.0 in my first semester of real effort, I added to my courseload, taking 17 credits in my second semester. I achieved another 4.0—not because I was naturally gifted, but because I applied my powers of concentration and discipline to the task.
Though my professional career has been a mixed bag, my shortcomings were not due to a lack of ability gained through concentration and mindfulness practice.
I spent ten years working full-time and maintaining a daily writing discipline on a website frequented by thousands of people per day. My readers often commented on their surprise and admiration for my productivity.
Whatever you want to accomplish in life, you will accomplish more if you develop your powers of concentration and discipline.
Mental disciplines
Like most people, I found daily life less satisfying and more stressful than it should be. Even when everything was going my way, it didn’t seem particularly fulfilling, and I was constantly disturbed by negative thoughts.
When I started practicing Buddhism in earnest, I already had developed strong concentration skills, but I lacked the wisdom to know what I should concentrate on.
Buddhism provided me with some basic skills that I put into practice to reduce or eliminate my issues with anger, attachment, discipline, and jealousy.
The suffering of anger ceases with the practice of patient acceptance.
The suffering of attachment ceases by meditating on impermanence.
The suffering of negative Karma ceases by practicing purification and moral discipline.
And the suffering of jealousy ceases with the practice of rejoicing.
These mental disciplines have made an enormous difference in the quality of my life.
Spiritual growth
All happiness and spiritual growth is a result of mental discipline. Nothing that comes easily or without effort produces personal satisfaction.
There is no secret, no single realization, no fact about life that you can learn that will make you a spiritual master.
Everyone longs for a spiritual shortcut, and many spiritual seekers embark on quests for the Holy Grail of instant enlightenment. It’s a fruitless waste of energy.
Spiritual growth is always a byproduct of discipline and concentration. In Buddhism, when people commit to a real practice—not merely learning intellectual facts—they are invited to start with the three higher trainings, moral discipline, higher concentration, and higher wisdom.
Without moral discipline, it’s impossible to maintain a peaceful mind free from distraction. An amoral person has lies to remember, rivals to fear, and negative consequences to avoid.
Higher concentration is essential to maintaining moral discipline and putting the wisdom teachings into practice.
Higher wisdom contains the four cessations I listed above, plus a large number of other teachings and virtues to put into practice.
