Meditation and Enlightenment (with Jeremy Stevenson)

Oct 13, 2020 1h 59m 18 insights Episode Page ↗
Spencer Greenberg speaks with Jeremy Stevenson about his extensive meditation journey, exploring various definitions of meditation, mindfulness, and enlightenment. They discuss Jeremy's profound experiences, the challenges of intensive retreats, and their collaborative project to map meditation techniques, skills, and insights.
Actionable Insights

1. Undertake Intensive Meditation Retreats

Participate in long, intensive meditation retreats (e.g., one month, 8-12 hours daily) where external distractions are removed. This immersive practice can lead to profound insights, reduced self-consciousness, and significant, lasting reductions in personal suffering.

2. Cultivate Unconditional Wellbeing

Actively pursue an alternative source of wellbeing that is not dependent on external circumstances or achievements. By cultivating this through meditation, you can find joy in basic activities and feel good for no external reason.

3. Explore Non-Dual Selflessness

Engage in non-dual meditation techniques, such as ’looking for the self’ to find only activity, or the ‘headless way’ (recognizing you cannot see your own head). The aim is to recognize the mind’s inherent selfless nature and access an unconditional source of wellbeing, distinct from the contents of consciousness.

4. Observe Impermanence for Emotion Regulation

Pay close attention to the transient nature of all experiences, particularly negative emotions, noticing how quickly they arise and pass away. This practice can reduce the perceived longevity of negative feelings, enabling more skillful emotion regulation and reducing suffering.

5. Recognize Inherent Unsatisfactoriness (Dukkha)

Cultivate an awareness that every conscious experience, even blissful ones, contains an element of unsatisfactoriness or imperfection. This insight can reduce envy by revealing shared human struggles and motivate deeper self-exploration through meditation.

6. Minimize Time Lost in Thought

Consciously reduce the amount of time you spend lost in thought. Recognizing that a majority of thoughts are often negative or neutral can provide motivation to lessen this habit, thereby improving overall wellbeing.

7. Practice Compassion Meditation

To cultivate compassion, repeat phrases like ‘May you be happy, may you be free from suffering,’ or imagine someone you love and extend that feeling to others, including strangers and those you dislike. This practice intrinsically feels good and offers a unique source of wellbeing.

8. Cultivate Equanimity & Meta-awareness

Practice mindfulness by developing equanimity—accepting all experiences (pleasant, unpleasant, neutral) without craving or aversion—and meta-awareness, which is being aware of your own awareness. This goes beyond simple presence and helps maintain a balanced mental state.

9. Apply Global Mental Noting

Practice mental noting by assigning a label to every primary experience that arises in your awareness, whether it’s a physical sensation, a thought, a sound, or an emotion like boredom. This technique fosters meta-awareness and can make any experience an object of interesting observation.

10. Label Thoughts for Distance

When thoughts arise, label them (e.g., ‘planning,’ ‘worrying’) to create distance from them. This technique, derived from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, can help you feel separate from your thoughts and achieve a sense of calm.

11. Enhance Pleasure Through Presence

Pay close, present attention to everyday activities, such as eating. This practice can significantly amplify the pleasure derived from simple experiences, making them more enjoyable.

12. View Meditation as Techniques

Approach meditation as a collection of psychological techniques rather than a rigid tradition. This allows for flexibility in exploring and combining methods to efficiently achieve personal goals, avoiding dogmatic viewpoints.

13. View Meditation as Diverse Training

Understand meditation as a broad form of mental training involving focused, repetitive cognitive engagement to cultivate various mental skills. This perspective highlights the vast array of techniques available, from attention control to emotion regulation, allowing for a more tailored and effective practice.

14. Observe Mind’s Interdependence

Pay close attention to your mind to notice the causal relationships between thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. This insight, similar to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, reveals how internal experiences influence each other.

15. Embrace Fear in Meditation

If you encounter scary or destabilizing experiences during meditation, embrace the fear and continue the practice, ideally with a teacher’s guidance. These are often signs of mental shifts and can lead to profound insights when navigated without resistance.

16. Practice Body Scan for Equanimity

After focusing on the breath, practice a body scan by slowly moving your attention across your body, noticing all physical sensations (e.g., tightness, tingling) without judgment or attachment. This Goenka Vipassana technique cultivates equanimity towards all bodily experiences.

17. Distinguish Meditation Goals

Maintain a broad, long-term goal for your meditation practice (e.g., wellbeing, insight), but avoid having specific short-term goals for what should happen in the present moment. This approach prevents frustration and allows for authentic experience during practice.

18. Be Skeptical of Rigid Enlightenment Models

Approach highly specific, multi-stage models of enlightenment with a degree of skepticism. While insights are valuable, rigid adherence to dogmatic, unfalsifiable claims about predictable stages may not align with individual experience and can be counterproductive.