Andrew Taggart, Ph.D.

Meditation

I. Serious Beginners

How To Start And Maintain A Practice

More and more people are interested in starting and maintaining a daily meditation practice, but few know how to begin or to continue on. I call these individuals serious beginners: those who are earnest about really getting started but who may need a teacher to offer instructions.

With serious beginners, I discuss

  • learning how to calm and stabilize the mind, relax and soften the body, and stabilize the breath
  • having the right motivation for practice
  • setting up a suitable environment for meditation
  • maintaining correct posture while sitting
  • making lifestyle changes for the sake of meditation as well as for that of ethical practice
  • identifying and moving past the common problems anyone starting out or seeking to continue is bound to run into

The basic hindrances to practice and within practice–or what, in Sanskrit, are called samskaras–often require deep exploration. We examine “our psychological baggage” with care, gentleness, and persistence.

II. Earnest Seekers

The Goal

The goal of meditation, for one on the path of knowledge, is to end all suffering by discovering and by being established in one’s essential nature.

The Path Of Knowledge

Four paths to our true nature are discernible throughout many traditions. In India, these are known as the path of concentration (raja yoga), the path of selfless action (karma yoga), the path of devout love (bhakti yoga), and the path of knowledge (jnana yoga). For instance, Rinzai Zen emphasizes great determination (cf. the path of concentration) whereas Christian mystics speak often of divine, unitive love (cf. bhakti yoga).

I teach the path of knowledge. For those wanting to know, above all, who they are or what reality ultimately is, this is the most natural approach. The many years I devoted to Socratic philosophy led me, in the end, to embrace the nondual knowledge that we find so clearly revealed in the heart of the Vedantic teaching.

Three Pillars Of Knowledge

The approach I take stands upon three pillars: Cleaning Up our psychological baggage (what other, premodern traditions would call “purification”); studying sacred texts with the aim of coming to intellectual understanding of the metaphysical doctrine (this is called manana–“pondering,” “reflecting,” or “contemplating” in Advaita Vedana); and diving deep into meditation in order to arrive at clear experiential understanding.

1. Cleaning Up

The latter term, borrowed from Ken Wilber, can be said to refer to skillfully opening to all the ego-selves inside with a view to disentangling your true nature from each appearance while also allowing each appearance to be slowly integrated into your essential being. Certain Western-style modalities like Focusing and Internal Family Systems can help to shed light on this process. I’ve developed a line of inquiry called “samskaric investigation” that seems to me to fast track our understanding.

2. Intellectual Study And Contemplation

Many Western spiritual seekers, in my experience, don’t have a deep enough grasp of the metaphysical doctrine upon which the nondual teaching rests. “Everything is oneness” or “All is consciousness,” while not incorrect, is nevertheless too vague. This is why Advaita Vedanta in particular invites us to study sacred texts, to listen to each with an open heart, and to use our intellect (buddhi) to contemplate what has been said. Does the teaching, as presented, make sense? Does it hang together? Does it answer the doubts thrown up by the mind? 

3. Inquiry-based Practices

Inquiry-based styles of meditation are centered on the experience of wonderment, not on the strenuous efforts of the will. One is like a child standing, without knowing, before the first dawn.

There are two complementary styles of the Direct Path approach that I teach: one, elucidated by Sri Ramana Maharshi, is Self-inquiry (atma vichara); the other, spelled out by Sri Atmananda, is termed “the Direct Method.” Ramana Maharshi entreats you to investigate the nature of the I to find out, essentially, what you are while Atmananda encourages you to carefully inspect the world, the body, and the mind so that you can, through a clear understanding of direct experience, discover that each is made only of consciousness–that is, of your essential being.

Contemplating Together

If you’d like to see whether this could be a good fit, please fill out the Contact Form. We’ll go through a process of discernment to tell whether we’re “meeting” each other.