“Prayer and meditation are our principal means of conscious contact with God. … As beginners in meditation, we might now reread this prayer several times very slowly, savouring every word and trying to take in the deep meaning of each phrase and idea. It will help if we can drop all resistance to what our friend says. For in meditation, debate has no place. We rest quietly with the thoughts of someone who knows, so that we may experience and learn.” (Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions)
“Meditation means personalising [religious principles], taking the abstract ideas, making them your own, and then coming away with an emotional takeaway that informs your behavioural choices. So: intellect, emotion, behaviour.” (Rabbi Shais Taub)
Now for some contemporary definitions of meditation:
“Meditation refers to a family of self-regulation practices that focus on training attention and awareness in order to bring mental processes under greater voluntary control and thereby foster general mental well-being and development and/or specific capacities such as calm, clarity, and concentration” and “[w]e define meditation … as a stylized mental technique … repetitively practiced for the purpose of attaining a subjective experience that is frequently described as very restful, silent, and of heightened alertness, often characterized as blissful.” “The aim of zazen is just sitting, that is, suspending all judgmental thinking and letting words, ideas, images and thoughts pass by without getting involved in them.” (Wikipedia)
These descriptions do not mention God or God’s will but refer to self-regulation of the body and mind, subjective experience, restfulness, silence, bliss. These are perhaps good things in themselves, and one might profitably adopt such practices if one is suited to them, but they are the opposite of the Step Eleven meditation. They lack any notion of seeking God’s will or relationship with God. They focus away from content and active engagement with it towards non-engagement and detachment. They are not about anything except the thought processes of thinker, in other words their focus is self.
Let’s look back at Step Eleven:
“Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.”
The purpose: conscious contact with God, knowledge of God’s will for us, the power to carry it out.
Reading the remainder of the passage from page 86 onwards of the Big Book:
“On awakening let us think about the twenty-four hours ahead. We consider our plans for the day. Before we begin, we ask God to direct our thinking, especially asking that it be divorced from self-pity, dishonest or self-seeking motives. Under these conditions we can employ our mental faculties with assurance, for after all God gave us brains to use. Our thought-life will be placed on a much higher plane when our thinking is cleared of wrong motives. … we ask God for inspiration, an intuitive thought or a decision … Nevertheless, we find that our thinking will, as time passes, be more and more on the plane of inspiration. We come to rely upon it.”
Thus, meditation (per Step Eleven) is about:
- Redirection away from self
- Redirection towards God
- Receiving guidance from God
- External, worldly content: what to do today
- Active engagement with content
- Actively managed thought about that content
This is not about detachment but active engagement.
I have found mental poise and balance through AA’s suggest meditation.
I tried practices consistent with contemporary notions of meditation, and I found them ineffective.
The reason for this was twofold:
Firstly, being alone with my thoughts, separate from others, from content, from the world, from God, undirected by anyone but myself, unfocused on a specific objective, detached from the external reality, and simply attempting to be present to myself to observe and learn about myself was torture. It increased my anxiety exponentially. I became more preoccupied with self. I was extremely unwell, and sometimes today can be extremely unwell, and the last thing I need under those conditions is introspection or severing my ties to the nuts and bolts of everyday reality.
Secondly, in thinking I had ticked the Step Eleven meditation box, I did not do AA’s suggestion meditation. I was not improving my conscious contact with God, I was not seeking God’s will or the power to carry that out, except through prayer (one side of the mechanism), and, in the absence of direction from God, I was living based on my ideas and my instincts.
The combination was a recipe for disaster.
I do sometimes employ calming forms of meditation (perhaps better termed contemplation), but now I always use content to focus on (Psalms are a great place to start). However, this is in addition to not instead of AA’s suggested meditation.