Recently, a friend briefly recounted her experience of a guided meditation. Our conversation set me wondering about guided meditation more generally.
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 programmes came to use verbal guidance and recordings for home practice, an approach that also became central to modern secular mindfulness programmes. When Jon Kabat-Zinn established Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) in 1979, guided recordings were already an important teaching aid. Yet the intention of MBSR was not to keep people following recordings. By the seventh week of the eight-week program, participants were encouraged to meditate without them. Guidance was like scaffolding, in place to help people 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 explains 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. But are there are 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 tells us what to visualise, feel or experience, their words shape our attention and expectations. This may be useful, but it also raises a question about the difference between following instructions to produce an experience and learning to be present with experience as it arises.
Ken McLeod raises a related concern in a teaching on the Eightfold Path. 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 approach practice as consumers seeking 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.
I appreciate that teachers need to make a living, and that recordings can make meditation accessible to people who might otherwise never encounter it. My concern is not whether or not money changes hands, but that the 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 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 or uncertainty about what to do. 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.
Are we learning to meditate, developing the capacity to be present with experience, or are we learning to follow a meditation? And are we practising to discover what is here, or to obtain something we think is missing?
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.