File Progress A CATCH 22 - THE NATURE OF PRACTICE (PDF-1009)

It is important for me to understand that practicing sitting meditation is just that: ‘practice’ and not the final result of that practice. For many years I assumed (falsely) that sitting practice was its own result and that assumption really cost me time and discouragement. Practice of any kind is “practice,” just as practicing scales and fingering on the guitar is practice and not the same as playing music. The distinction somehow escaped me.

I wish someone had pointed this out to me years ago. Although the word “practice” was right in front of me all the time and I even called the sitting meditation I was doing at the time “my practice,” somehow the common meaning of that word never registered. It was just a label that everyone I knew used. We all did our dharma “practice.” So what is practice, practicing for what?

Dharma practice (or meditation practice) and its goal is a perfect case of Catch-22, a circular argument, each part of which depends on all the others. It is the old razor and shave analogy. It is the shave we are after, not the razor, although the quality of the shave can depend on the razor, and so on. The shave here refers to the awareness and mindfulness that results from meditation practice and the shaver is the meditation practice itself, the technique or means. Meditation practice (the technique itself) is not the result of that practice, but the means to obtain the result. This is true of any kind of practice.