On the face of it, sitting meditation is very easy. Sit in an upright but relaxed posture. Notice your in-breath and out-breath. When you get distracted, return to your in-breath and out-breath. That’s it. There are some variations: walking meditation, centering prayer (using a mantra or “prayer word”), and mindful eating, among others. Some people use aids like rosaries or mala beads to count breaths or mantra repetitions. Some people use a singing bowl or a bell to aid the mind’s entry into silence. Some people use a cushion on the floor, some use a seiza bench, some use a simple chair. Regardless of specifics, the point is to maintain focused attention on an object like a mantra or an activity like breathing. When distractions arise, return to the point of focus. This is what it means to have a “practice” or to “sit.” In this sense, then, having a practice is very easy. There’s only one thing to do. But if you give it a try, you’ll quickly find that it is at times difficult, frustrating, and supremely boring.

I learned this the first time I tried to sit. I recall that I set an alarm for five minutes, a modest goal, straightened my spine, and closed my eyes. I felt my nostrils flare as I breathed in. I felt an unevenness in my chair and wondered if the floor was slanted. I wondered whether or not there was something wrong with the structure of my apartment, whether or not someone had damaged a load-bearing wall underneath me, and whether or not the floor would collapse or the roof would cave in. I thought about what hospital I would have to go to, if I were to survive. I thought about my friends and family visiting me in the emergency room, about what a burden it would be for them to have to travel to me from out of town. I thought about what a burden I must be on everyone, even without the fantasy-disaster I had just constructed. I thought about how ungrateful I am to those around me on a daily basis, and what they must think of me. I pictured myself as a groveling humanoid rat with my own facial features. I opened my eyes and only thirty seconds had passed. Already, I had discovered something valuable, if disheartening: I wasn’t going to reach “enlightenment,” “mystical union,” or any other exalted state through meditation. There was nothing metaphysical or supernatural about sitting. It was just sitting. I couldn’t even sit quietly. Outwardly I may have been still, but inwardly, my mind was not only distracted, it was also full of destructive thought-patterns, feelings of self-loathing, insecurity, and anxiety.

Since that first sit many years ago, I’ve maintained a more or less regular practice. My expectations of what meditation would do for me, however, have drastically changed. There’s nothing mystical or quasi-mystical about entering into a meditative state. I hesitate to even use the phrase “meditative state,” as if it’s a somehow different state than everyday consciousness. In reality, meditative consciousness is basically the same as non-meditative consciousness with the exception of one factor: mindfulness. In practicing mindfulness, we cultivate an ability to sustain focused attention for longer and longer periods of time. Believe it or not, this is a skill that can be learned. In our age of social media distraction, constant alerts and notifications, dopamine-inducing apps and multitasking, cultivating focused attention is something that is difficult to do. The more plugged in you are, the more hostile your environment is to cultivating mindfulness.

I practice as a Christian, and as a Christian theologian and philosopher, specifically. One of the great tragedies in Christianity, at least in the circles with which I’m involved, is the fact that we’ve made prayer primarily about asking God for things. Prayer, as I understand it, can and does involve addressing God, but it is more fundamentally about a transformation of the self such that we can be receptive to the things of God in God’s Self-gift of creation, both exterior and interior. It is, in a sense, about “getting out of our own way,” about laying bare the “hidden self” that St. Paul talked about (Eph. 3:16). Typically we navigate the world as if we are separated from God and others, as if we are autonomous selves, as if everything beneath our skin is “me” and everything else is “not me.” The reality is that we are always in communion with God in our inner being, and that the “self” is not an autonomous substance. It is, rather, a fluid process of becoming. It’s actually not much like a “self” at all, in the conventional sense.

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We can use the word “self” to signify this process of becoming, but with the same gesture, we’ll need to strike through it in order to make it clear that we’re referring to something that often eludes conventional awareness. It takes a great deal of attention to notice this. Prayer is about revealing this liberated self that is always-already in communion with God, that is always-already receptive to the gifts of God, that is more fundamental than the self of gross consciousness, the everyday self that worries about what their next meal will be (Matthew 6:31–34). But the revelation of this self requires the cultivation of subtle attention. It is not something that one can notice straightaway. Martin Laird writes, “Contemplation does not produce this ‘hidden self’ but facilitates the falling away of all that obscures it.”[1] One of the factors that obscures this interior communion with God is our undisciplined attention. The practice of cultivating the right attention so that we can notice our selves is the practice of prayer.

Christian theology presupposes that the theologian is engaged in some form of prayer, and aims at what Origen called “enoptic” awareness, literally in-sight (enoptike).[2] Of course we can challenge the vision-centeredness of a word like “insight,” but it is intriguing that the Pali word vipassana, which literally means “insight” or “clear sight,” is also the name for a method of meditation that focuses on bodily and emotional sensation rather than on visual phenomena. The enoptic awareness that I intend here is not confined to “sight” or “reason” construed in any strict sense. Rather, it involves the totality of awareness: visual, olfactory, auditory, tactile, gustatory, kinesthetic, affective, emotional, intellectual, subtle, gross—in sum, the infinitely divisible manifold of ways we could describe regionally specific features of our being-in-the-world. For me, practicing meditation aims at making more explicit and thematic those aspects of existence that are often covered over in gross experience, and it does this through the cultivation of a style of attention that doesn’t fail to miss them. Sitting meditation is, then, a kind of ascetic practice, like fasting, that helps us widen and deepen the aperture of our attention so that the subtleties of Being can show themselves.

One does not reach an exalted state through sitting. One does not achieve a blissful, ecstatic union with God. Sitting is the most mundane of practices. And yet, the kind of attention that one cultivates in sitting is indispensable for the practice of prayer and, by extension, the practice of Christian theology (though, importantly, sitting is not the only practice in which this kind of attention can be cultivated). When the aperture of perception is widened, when attention becomes more disciplined, more extended, more trained, then subtle awareness becomes possible: the subtle awareness of both the interior and the exterior.

[1] Martin Laird, Into the Silent Land (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) 8.

[2] Andrew Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) 57.