About This Approach to Meditation and How it is Taught

by Jason Siff

I have been teaching meditation in this particular way for nearly two decades and would not teach any other way. I believe whole-heartedly in this form of meditation and have repeatedly seen its benefits in myself and others. It has its roots in Vipassana Meditation as found in the Mahasi Method (which is commonly known as "Insight Meditation" or "Mindfulness Meditation"), but is in many respects the antithesis of that form of meditation. I have gone through many names for this approach and still cannot find one that covers it completely. But here are the names and what they have referred to:

1. Analytic Awareness: awareness of one's meditation experiences that leads to an analysis (meaning "investigation") of them.
2. Unlearning Meditation: the process by which one sees into one's existing meditation practice and is able to notice various habits of mind generated by that practice, leading to gradually dropping aspects of that practice that have created an impasse in one's meditative development.
3. Skillful Meditation: a flexible approach to meditation, in which one allows experiences to form and become known before making "skillful" choices in one's meditation sittings. I believe this approach requires developing "awareness through recollection" and the beginnings of "unlearning meditation."
4. "Anupassana": I use the Pali word "anupassana" to distinguish it from "vipassana" meditation. Even though it is a form of vipassana meditation, vipassana nowadays is understood to be either the Goenka method of body-scanning or the Mahasi Method of noting.

How It is Taught

Even though we have had another website for a number of years, where people have read the meditation instructions and tried them out, I don't know how well this forum has worked for meditation teaching. This is because I have only heard back from a handful of people who have found me on the web. I will let you be the judge about how well this works for as a way to meditate, but please, if you can, be kind enough to let me know, say after a week or two of trying out this approach.

I have been training teachers in this approach for the last few years and this is how we tend to teach:

We teach in small groups of no larger than fifteen people, with the average size being about five to ten people. There are periods of meditation sitting, which are twenty to forty minutes long, followed by periods of people talking about their meditation sittings in the group. But this is not group sharing. It is an exploration into an individual's meditation sitting. We generally only have time for two or three people at the most to go through such an exploration during one of these group reporting periods.

The person reporting is given these simple instructions:

1. You have as much time as you need, so you can take your time.
2. Describe your experience in your own words and try to avoid using concepts or labels. For example, one might speak of feeling "restless" in the meditation sitting. Try to describe that feeling and the thoughts and sensations associated with it instead of being satisfied with the label of "restlenssness." This may take some effort, and is well worth it.
3. You only need to speak about personal things which you are completely comfortable talking about in the group. You need not reveal anything painful, shameful, or private unless you are ready to do so. And that is the case only if it occurred in the meditation sitting or provides background for what you went through in the sitting.

The group is given this single simple instruction:

Listen to what the person reporting is saying without interrupting or asking questions. You may find that the person is articulating similar experiences to ones you have had in meditation, and so use this as an opportunity to reflect on those meditation experiences and learn something else about them.