Recently, a friend recounted her experience of a guided meditation. Because I don’t experience mental imagery, I’ve tended to avoid these, assuming that they depend heavily on visualisation. Our conversation prompted me to look more closely at guided meditation and its place in practice.
I was surprised to learn that contemporary guided meditation owes a considerable debt to twentieth-century Western therapeutic relaxation. Historian Ayesha Nathoo traces how relaxation programs came to use verbal guidance and recordings for home practice, an approach that also became central to modern secular mindfulness programs. When Jon Kabat-Zinn established Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) in 1979, guided recordings were already an important teaching aid. Interestingly, by the seventh week of the eight-week MBSR program, participants were encouraged to meditate without the recordings. Guidance was intended to serve as scaffolding, in place temporarily to help people gradually develop the capacity to practise independently.
The question of whether guidance is helpful depends in part on the function of the meditation being practised. For example, when asked whether dzogchen trekchö can be practised as a guided meditation, James Low explained that trekchö involves disidentification—separating the knowing aspect of mind from its fusion with whatever is arising—whereas guided meditations for visualising oneself as Tara or Padmasambhava for example, involve identification.
From: Questions & Answers 7, 10 February 2021.
Today, guided meditations are available in almost limitless variety—for relaxation, sleep, anxiety, confidence, emotional healing, and compassion—to name just a few. Apps allow us to select a meditation according to the experience we hope to have. Could there be pitfalls when we approach meditation this way?
Alexander Berzin, a scholar and practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism, cautions that habitual reliance on guided meditation can undermine confidence in practising independently. He also raises the question of suggestion: when someone describes what to visualise, feel or experience, their words shape our attention and expectations. If our intention in meditation is to be present with whatever arises, without grasping, rejecting or ignoring, we might ask whether guided meditation is helping us develop that capacity or encouraging us to seek particular experiences instead.
Ken McLeod raises a related concern. He describes a pattern of speech he calls spell talk, in which the rhythm and tone of the voice can induce a sleepy, almost hypnotic state. When used in guided meditation, he suggests, this works against the purpose of cultivating wakefulness. It's not only what the guiding voice tells us to experience, but how the voice itself affects our experience.
From: Practicing View, Intention, Speech, and Action, The Eightfold Path, 1
Commodification of meditation is a further concern. Recordings may be packaged, branded and marketed according to their promised benefits, encouraging us to seek particular experiences. As Jeff Wilson explores in Mindful America, mindfulness has become a commercial product, while Ronald Purser, in McMindfulness, argues that Buddhist practices have increasingly been repackaged as techniques for self-improvement, often detached from their ethical and liberating purposes.
Such commodification may foster and normalise a transactional relationship with practice: I meditate in order to get something. This could be calm, clarity, relief from anxiety, a sense of spaciousness, or perhaps even awakening. A guided meditation may promise an experience, and we may follow the instructions hoping to obtain it, judging the meditation afterwards according to whether it delivered what we expected. Yet much of Buddhist practice involves investigating precisely this impulse to acquire, improve or control our experience.
When we practise in silence, we may encounter restlessness, boredom, distraction, uncertainty, and many flavours of emotional material. These experiences offer opportunities to recognise our habitual reactions and to discover what happens when we bring them into awareness. A guiding voice may carry us past these experiences before we've had a chance to notice them.
Guided meditation can be valuable, particularly when we are learning a new practice or when guidance serves a specific purpose. But I think it’s worth examining our relationship with it. Are we able to practise independently, or are we reliant on spoken instructions? Are we learning to recognise and work with whatever arises, or becoming accustomed to having our attention and experience directed? Perhaps the most important question is whether our meditation is helping us become more present to life as it is.
Notes:Trekchö is the cutting through of our identification with our interpretations. Through these we turn the immediacy of experience into a world of apparently solid subjects and objects.
Interestingly, Alexander Berzin's discussion of overdependence on guided meditation originally appeared in Relating to a Spiritual Teacher: Building a Healthy Relationship (2000), well before smartphone meditation apps became widespread.