Habit Formation and 'Non Doing' in Meditation

Series: Divergent Obstacles, Divergent Gifts

During a recent time of busy-ness and stress, burnout brewing in ways both sinister and familiar, I found myself unable to meditate. I didn't want to get out of bed in the dark. I didn't want to find my clothes, unroll my mat and set up my bench. I didn't want to sit with the resistance, the unwillingness, the restless legs, the tight shoulders.

And so I didn’t. But – unlike at earlier, similar, times in my life – neither did I stop sitting.

I see burnout coming now. I recognise the way easy things become hard, the way meaning and joy leach out of the things I love. I knew, this time, that I needed to rest. But I also knew that I needed my daily meditation practice. And so I struck a deal with myself. I would still get up early but I would lay out clothes the night before, so that getting dressed involved no decisions and little thought. Rather then sitting on a bench, my hands arranged in well-trained mudra, I would curl up on the sofa under a weighted blanket with a cup of tea at my side. If I wanted to take a sip of tea, or shift position, or scratch my nose, then I would do that.

This might not sound like rocket science but, for me, it was radically new. Recently I heard someone say: if something is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly. I love this idea. These kinds of small changes have allowed me to keep sitting without making burnout worse. But, in some ways, implementing them hasn’t been easy. Like many autistic people, I have a tendency towards black-and-white thinking. I’m a perfectionist. Until I’m not. I’m all grit-toothed rush and then: sod it. It's like, if I can't do it really well then I'd better not do it at all. And I've grown up in a Zen Buddhist tradition that, with its focus on forms both constraining and reassuring, appears to hold its practitioners to similarly high standards.

Because of this, my sleepy sofa meditations have, at times, felt like a small rebellion. I’m not sure if it’s my Zen ancestors I think I’m disobeying, or perhaps only against a stern part of myself projected out. I have wondered whether I’m allowed to meditate this way, whether it counts. It’s as if, if it’s not hard, then it must be a cop out. It's as if the ghost of some medieval monk is going to come sweeping in through the window, all eyebrows and fiery breath, to strike me down.

At the same time, as I’ll explain, accommodating myself this way has changed my meditation practice for the better and not only by allowing me to keep doing it.

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One thing that can be helpful in establishing a daily meditation practice is understanding, adapting and implementing the basic science of behaviour change. This is particularly true for those of us who, because we are neurodivergent, struggle with periods of burnout, and with the impaired executive function, sensory overwhelm and increased demand avoidance that often come with them.

For sheer simplicity and memor­able-ness I often return to the work of BJ Fogg at Stanford University on what he calls ‘tiny habits’. He tells us that, when establishing a new habit, three things need to be in place:

• First the habit needs to be so small that it's do-able, even on the hardest days. For me, removing some demands from my meditation practice – a particular posture, physical stillness, a certain idealisation of strenuous effort – achieved this. If it hadn’t, I could have also experimented with making the meditation short in duration, even just a minute or two. If I had been trying to establish a new meditation habit, rather than reviving a floundering one, that's probably what I would have done.

• Second, the habit needs to be tied to something you already do. Although I don’t have many fixed points in my days, I do get up in the morning and go to bed at night, drink coffee, and eat at fairly regular times, so I have a few existing activities to which I can tie new habits. For me, meditating first thing in the morning works best, while everyone is still asleep, and before the chaos of life comes along to scupper all my plans.

• Finally, he recommends celebrating every time you do the thing. The idea of this makes me cringe and, until I sat down to write this, I thought I skipped this step. But then I remembered that, every single day, I write meditation on my to do list and then tick it off. This is daft and embarrassing. It also totally works. I never tire of the daily hit of dopamine and I hate to leave the box unticked.

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But beyond adhering to the rules of behaviour change, I think there has been a deeper benefit to my morning sofa meditations. By stripping daily practice back to what is do-able even on my worst days, I was able to see that I had become too identified with the trappings of meditation. I had been trying to perform and perfect a technique where really there was none. Even after all these years I think I was still, on some level, trying to figure out what I was supposed to be doing.

When really I wasn’t supposed to be doing anything. Unlike most habits we might hope to form, when it comes to meditation there is no thing we are aiming to do or achieve: no technique; no method; no series of steps; no goal; no exam at the end.

In fact, no end.

The gift of that period of burnout was that, unable to do what I thought I was supposed to do, I was able to see the non-doing-ness more clearly. I became less identified with the body sitting there. If I took a sip of tea, it made no difference to stillness itself. If I got distracted, the vast and infinite space remained undistracted. If I scratched my nose, existence didn’t scratch its nose. In this way, nothing I did mattered.

In particular it didn't matter, I realised, that this body sometimes needs accommodations to be comfortable, to make meditation possible (the weighted blanket, the sofa, the hot cup of tea). Whatever I did or didn’t do, life remained fully itself in all its variety. It was as if, in doing less, putting in less effort, I became less identified with this heap of sensations, thoughts and feelings I call ‘me’. Somehow, then, life could spring up in all its radiance, like turning up the volume on music that had been playing in the background all along.

For me, this is work in progress. Sometimes I still find myself wondering if what I’m doing is meditation at all, if I shouldn't be trying harder. But I haven't gone back to sitting on my bench. Not yet, at least. This ‘doing nothing’ experiment seems, right now, to help in a way that’s hard to name. Words fail. They always do, of course, but especially when it comes to what really matters.

Energy moves. Attention moves. Seagulls fly outside the window. There are voices elsewhere in the flat as my family wake. I've heard the term 'choiceless awareness' for years but, sitting here doing the most intensive nothing that I can, I suddenly know what it means: the richly textured yet transparent joy of being right here.