I Meditated This Morning

Especially — but not only — if you’re new to meditation, most of us have this experience: You sit down. You settle the body. You bring the object to mind. And then some unmeasured stretch of time goes by — could be forty seconds, could be four minutes — before you notice that you are sitting, but not meditating. There’s a difference, and the tradition has a way of talking about it.

When we talk about calm abiding, we distinguish between intention and application. Intention is the decision to meditate, to focus on a specific object of meditation. Application is the work of fixing our focus on the object and keeping it there. Deciding to meditate and doing the work aren’t the same thing, and only one of them is the practice.

Because deciding to do something feels a lot like doing it, we tend to think of intention and application as the same thing. We make the effort of deciding to get on the cushion. We protect the time; we choose to sit maybe when we’d rather not. That’s important, and it has to come first. The intention gets us facing the right direction, toward our object of meditation. But then we have to do the work of keeping our focus on it. That’s the application.

You can feel the difference once you’re looking for it. There’s a version of sitting where the mind is in the neighborhood of the practice — thinking about the object, thinking about meditating, thinking about how the sit is going. We have the intention but not the application. And then there’s a version where we do the work of resting the mind on one thing and holding it there. That’s application.

Maybe you’re thinking, why is it important to make these distinctions? It’s not just to be fussy; it helps us know what to check and what to look for.

Instead of asking myself whether I meditated this morning, I can ask myself what I focused my mind on. I can — and have — sat on the cushion without focusing and said, “I meditated this morning.” Or I can go beyond simple intention and apply myself to holding focus on a specific object of meditation, whether it’s an image, a teaching passage, or a reading. And it’s the application of effort that makes it meditation.

The quiet good news underneath the technical vocabulary is that this is trainable. The tradition bothers to distinguish intention from application to help us notice when there’s a gap and know what to do about it.

We practice and learn together in Chattanooga, in person and online. I’d love for you to join us.