Thoughts in Meditation

Series: Divergent Obstacles, Divergent Gifts

Right from the start, I knew I was out of my depth. The other people on the course were directors and voice coaches: in other words, extroverts. I watched in silent awe as they entered the windowless room at the Scottish Conservatoire and took up space, bantering and flirting with each other, throwing off scarves and coats, and complaining about the weather. It was darling this and darling that. It felt like being in a play. I didn’t like the role I was inhabiting: the more they talked, the less I could.

The first thing we had to do was sit in a circle and introduce ourselves. This is one of my least favourite things to do. I sat there watching the hot potato of speech coming round the circle towards me. Then it was my turn. As I spoke, I noticed an older woman further round the circle frowning at me as I stumbled over my words. I could tell she thought I was an idiot, that she was wondering what I was doing there. Every time I glanced at her, I felt worse. I stuttered to a stop.

A few minutes later, it was this woman’s turn to introduce herself. She spoke for a while. Then she looked right at me.

‘It’s the strangest thing,’ she said. ‘I was trying to remember where I knew you from. And then I realised. You see, I’m a Quaker and, in the book we use, there’s this line that speaks about a place beyond this world. Before we come here to be born, we live there together as souls.

‘And that is where I know you from,’ she said.

Then she started to cry.

I don’t remember the woman’s name. Once the course was over, we never met again. And I never found the passage she referred to in the Quaker Book of Faith and Practice, even though I looked for it. But I’ve never forgotten that moment. I’ve never forgotten how wrong I was. It taught me I really don’t know what other people are thinking. It taught me that sometimes all I’m seeing is my own harsh view of myself. It taught me that, even when I feel disconnected, there might well be a deeper connection I can’t recognise.

---

Today I want to share some thoughts about thoughts. This is partly to dispel another myth that’s especially damaging to neurodivergent people – the idea that meditation is about ‘emptying the mind’ – and it’s partly to try to understand my own thinking better, in the hope some of what I learn might resonate with some of you.

In the autistic community it’s common to talk about, and to experience, Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria (RSD). This term refers to the way we sometimes see judgement and rejection in other people’s responses to us, even when it isn’t there. It comes from being part of a minority group; our natural ways of expressing ourselves are often wrong in the eyes of the majority and this is reflected back to us across our lives until we come to expect it. What I described above is an instance of this.

I have been wondering lately whether this sense of ‘getting it wrong’ might be more far reaching than the term RSD suggests. When it comes to the experience of meditation, where there is no other being to reject us, I have often been plagued by a feeling that I’m getting it wrong. Hearing other neurodivergent people talk about their struggles with establishing a meditation practice, I realise I’m not alone in that.

Perhaps living in a neurotypical world with this feeling of constantly getting it wrong – missing the point, putting a foot in it, saying too little or too much, or having to bend over backwards to do what others seem to do effortlessly – shakes us to our core, until RSD becomes not a social experience but an existential one. We assume wrongness in ourselves until we’re proved wrong about it and, in meditation, such proof might be a long time coming.

In scientific experiments, they talk about the n value, which refers to a study’s sample size. Recently I came across the idea that when you’re deciding what to do for your health – what to eat, how to move – you’re working with an n of 1. There’s no need to generalise. You only have to work out what suits your own body and mind.

This idea is useful for meditation too.

I once heard a meditation teacher talk about anger in meditation and how all we needed to do was feel it viscerally in the body: a churning feeling in the stomach, a tightness of breath, heat in the hands. He described these physical manifestations of anger as if they were self-evident. But I don’t feel anger in the body this way. Hearing this at the time, before I knew I was autistic, I thought I must be doing something wrong. I think I even tried to find the experience he described, to persuade myself that I did, in fact, feel anger this way.

Words are slippery and this is maddening. I would try to twist and squash my experience to fit the description I was hearing. Perhaps, after all, he was only using different words for the same thing. I suppose there is always a process of translation between the wordless inner experience and the words we use to talk about it. John Berger has this to say about translation:

We read and reread the words of the original text in order to penetrate through them, to reach, to touch the vision or experience which prompted them. We then gather up what we have found there and take this quivering almost wordless ‘thing’ and place it behind the language into which it needs to be translated. And now the principal task is to persuade the host language to take in and welcome the ‘thing’ which is waiting to be articulated.

In one sense, every act of speech is an act of translation, but when we’re neurodivergent, or a member of any minority group, this effect is magnified. It can feel like you’re doing this all the time. And that something is always lost.

In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein said that there is no such thing as private language. If it’s private, then it’s not language. At least, I think that’s what he said. When I tried to read about it, I found there has been a lot of debate about what his private language argument actually means, even whether it counts as an argument at all, which makes a point he might, or might not, have been meaning to make: that, even if language must always be public, what we mean is not always what is heard.

In Buddhism it is commonly said that language is a finger pointing at the moon, not the moon itself. When I hear a teacher talk about meditation, there must, then, be a process of translation. I aim to match the finger-words I hear with my own experience. I suppose that must be true for any meditation student. But, for many neurodivergent meditators, the experience of feeling at odds with the world, coupled with real differences in our ways of experiencing, can leave us thinking – when we inevitably hear a lot of fingers and no moons – there’s something wrong with our practice.

---

If I’m still feeling this way after all these years meditating, then I’m not a very good advertisement for it. Except, as I understand it, meditation isn’t about getting rid of anything. It isn’t about being calm all the time, or always knowing the right thing to say, or floating free of everyday concerns. It’s about seeing it all, seeing it for what it is. Thoughts come and go; we don’t have to believe them. And meditation might be, for some of us, the very thing that helps us change our relationship with our busy minds, our distracted minds, our self-judgement and self-doubt.

So how might we approach it? I think it starts with understanding that, when it comes to meditation at least, there is no getting it wrong. What we experience is what we experience. The finger pointing at the moon can help but we still have to find the moon for ourselves. According to meditation teacher Helen Hamilton, we don’t have any choice in this. We might think we are ‘doing’ meditation but, the more we sit, the more we see it isn’t really like that. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that meditation is doing us, or meditation is doing itself. We don’t choose to become distracted. We don’t choose to ‘come back’. And if we’re not choosing any of it, we can’t really get it wrong. All we can do is experience it all as fully as possible. Everything is welcome as part of this, even the ‘getting it wrong’ thoughts themselves.

At the same time, while all thoughts are welcome, none are true. We could even say that all our thoughts are fingers and none of them moon. And this is the deeper reason why we so often feel that we’re getting it wrong. Because anything we can say with certainty is called into question. Meditation is challenging. It brings us hard up against everything we think we know. We get so close it blurs and fractures, breaks apart. This is true not only for neurodivergent meditators but for all of us.

And that’s why a certain amount of confidence helps. If you’re going to journey alone through a strange continent where you don’t speak the language, it helps to trust yourself. In this case, the obstacles are not the thoughts themselves, however much they race or tell us that we’re wrong. The obstacle is living in a world that has taught us to doubt ourselves. And the antidote to this, when self-criticism comes biting, is the gap created through knowing we might be wrong about our wrongness: finding we were connected all along, in the place where souls live.