As I’ve written about in previous months, choosing which technique to do is often an important part of navigating a meditation practice.
Perhaps you are someone who’s new enough to meditation such that you simply do whatever technique is presented in a class or is next in an app, or perhaps there’s just one technique that you know how to guide yourself in. In such circumstances, your choice of meditation strategy is easy. But if you’re someone who knows how to guide yourself on multiple techniques or can see multiple interesting choices listed in an app, then you have a choice to make.
One way of looking at things is that it’s helpful to stick with one technique and go deep with it over the months and years. I’ve heard some meditation teachers say that it’s like how a person will never hit the water table by digging multiple three feet deep holes, and we can only dig a well by sticking with one spot and dedicatedly digging there. There’s also, however, value in exploring and examining our human condition from different angles and using different meditation techniques to do so. This is similar to the famous ancient parable of the five blind men, and how they best understood the shape of an elephant by combining their various perspectives.
In many areas of life, we have a choice between sticking with activities that are our strengths, that we enjoy, and are naturally and easily good at, on the one hand, and then on the other hand trying to develop and apply ourselves at things that don’t come naturally to us and to develop skills that are out of our comfort zones. There are of course good reasons to make either choice. This is true when picking meditation techniques as well as in the rest of life.
A different useful heuristic for picking a meditation technique that my main teacher Shinzen Young often presents is “I.O.N.” – which stands for, “interest, opportunity, and necessity”. An example of “interest” would be, “I just learned a new meditation technique and want to explore it more on my own”. An example of “opportunity” would be, “I see some dried leaves blowing in beautiful patterns in the wind, and this seems like a good time to practice mindfulness of external vision”. And an example of “necessity” would be, “I was trying to meditate on verbal thoughts, but my hip is in so much pain that I am going to switch over to fully mindfully experiencing that”. (Shinzen further explains that “I.O.N.” also applies not just to a choice between different techniques, but also ways to implement a chosen technique, for example whether to recite noting labels silently or out loud.)
Like with so much in life, the more one explores meditation techniques, the more one develops a natural feel as to how to best pick which technique is appropriate for oneself for a given meditation sitting.