Enlightenment isn’t some magical state of bliss

It’s simply getting out of your own way.

I found enlightenment at the end of an outbreath. Enlightenment, God, the universe, non-duality, or everything that is. Let’s call it “egolessness.”

I’d been trying to practice what made sense to me on paper. Chögyam Trungpa, the great Tibetan Buddhist teacher, taught his students to pay most attention to the outbreath. The way I learned to meditate, Vipassanna or insight meditation, doesn’t emphasize either the inbreath or the outbreath over the other. But 30 minutes into a sit, Trungpa’s method clicked. It was like some sort of slippage or a reset of my mind’s CPU. At the end of an outbreath I felt a gap. Everything around me continued on even though I’d let go of it. I realized that everything didn’t need my constant management. The universe is ok, I’m ok. I felt a peaceful emptiness.

The thought that I existed at all seemed silly and narcissistic. You’ll die someday, and so what? All of life and death will continue on, I thought and laughed inside.

Trungpa calls his method “touch and go”:

“As the breath is going out, become the breathing. Try to identify with the breath, rather than watching it. This is the touch part. Then, as you breathe in, you boycott the breath; you boycott your concentration on the breath. That is the go part.”

You “touch” your existence by concentrating on the outbreath. You feel the air leaving your stomach and lungs and out through your nostrils. If it helps, think of it from the other side of the coin, as releasing your grip from, or ignoring, your surroundings. Relax your body as you breath out — while maintaining a basic meditation posture, straight and upright, of course. But really release, especially in the shoulders, hands, and stomach. Feel them from the inside out.

Just be there, whatever the consequences of how someone else might perceive you. Ignore your surroundings. Let them dissolve. Turn inward and identify with the body as it breathes out, feel it as you.

The inbreath is just the opposite. Release your grip from, or “boycott,” the breath. Extend your attention outwards to the space around you. Vacuum it up. Hear the sounds — not any particular one but all of them at once. You can think of grabbing and pulling the energy of the sound down into your gut with your breath if it helps. But the key is to point your attention outwards. This is the “go.”

Once full of breath, release again, identifying with your breath as it leaves your body.

As you practice, thoughts will occasionally block your attention to this cycle, especially early in a meditation period. The tough conversation that you avoided the night before, the trip you need to plan, your self-criticism, are bound to come up as you sit. Thoughts feel huge, like you’re absorbed in a novel or watching a movie. But they’re just thoughts, the content of mind, like the air in a breath. When you realize you’re caught up, let the thought dissolve away and return to the cycle of breath. Touch and go.

The breath is your anchor, and just like being on a boat, once you throw the anchor down and tie off its rope the question becomes, “Now what?” Do I fish? Do I take a nap or eat lunch? Do, do, do. Like sitting and breathing in meditation, floating in an anchored boat is bound to be boring. On your boat a storm may come and freak you out, really get you tangled up. The clouds command your attention and you forget what you came out on the water to do. You consider heading back to shore, to “normal” life, off the cushion. But stick with it. Thoughts are like clouds that come and go and cover the warmth of the sun. And your breath reminds you that the sun is still there, just behind the clouds.

In Trungpa’s Shambhala teachings, the sun is a metaphor for the innate wakefulness of human beings, our own “inherent brilliance,” i.e., egolessness. When you touch and go you’re practicing releasing the burden of constantly managing yourself to protect the idea that you exist — not your physical existence, the idea of it. We carry this idea, the ego, around in our back pocket and it shapes most of our action. We defend it, pump it up, and criticize it. When “touch and go” clicked for me I was startled, because without a reference point — the ego — I felt lost. But now it’s just like anything else I’ve learned to feel through meditation — a useful tool to ground myself when I’m caught up in thought.

The wisest of meditation teachers will tell you so-called “enlightened” moments are rare, if they happen at all. Meditation offers brief moments of egolessness and the occasional profound insight, but for the most part it’s hard effort. The mindfulness it produces is more a feeling of slight ease than a bong-rippy high. If you’re looking to go for a ride, go get high. If you’re looking for big answers in your life, talk to a friend or see a therapist. If what you’re looking for is a little more wiggle room, give meditation a try.

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