Debugging Doubt (pt 1)
in meditation and the jhanas
Doubt prevents jhanas and other fun, useful things in life. It's been a challenge I've been working with a lot, so I wanted to share the techniques and thoughts I've found useful for doubting less.
The first step is to just notice doubt. Noticing makes it dissolve because awareness is its own solvent. If you are thinking about doubt in your experience, friends and teachers are pointing out that you’re seeming doubtful, or you’re reading a blog post about doubt, then you’ll eventually map out the ways it shows up for you, but I’ll share my experience, so you don’t have to learn to spot everything on your own.
At the lowest level, it’s a pattern of sensation in the body that we slap a verbal label on, an emotion. We also call strings of thoughts, or narratives, doubtful. There’s subtle and more obvious versions of each kind of doubt. Whenever I notice doubtful narratives or thoughts, it’s useful to nonverbally notice where it’s showing up in the body, in what shape, and what the sensation quality is like– bubbly, prickly, dense, coarse, smooth, velvety, sand-like, etc.
Frequently questioning the validity of experience is doubt. Is the jhana happening? Am I there yet? Am I doing the technique right? During sits, this type of doubt sucks because continually asking if it’ll happen prevents it from happening, because doubt is a type of tension in the body that’s not conducive for cultivating jhana, and questioning breaks continuity of the nice feeling we’re trying to cultivate, preventing you from ever reaching full saturation of that experience. Doubt is a rate-limiter on pleasant emotion, pleasure, and peace.
Another symptom of doubt is switching practices or techniques too frequently. The solution here is to just notice it’s happening and investigate why you’re switching.
Are you switching because you’re bouncing off the emotion of doubt, creating a narrative about the technique’s effectiveness because you’re running from challenges appearing in meditation, preventing you from fostering curious and creative responses instead? I’ve recognized myself doing this in hindsight, but being aware of it will help you avoid this trap altogether. And if doubts are coming up as stories you are telling yourself like this, that’s great because you have a trailhead to begin seeing the emotion that spawns them or that’s simmering underneath.
Doubt can be quite subtle. When I was first trying to move into the fifth jhana, I was using a technique of radiating equanimity in different directions.
The first example of doubt in this situation that I noticed was that the intention to radiate was like holding the assumption that the space would never be fully filled with equanimity. Radiating assumed there was a differential, and assuming part of experience was not yet the reflection of my ideal intention prevented it from being fully realized.
So I just intended for the entire space in front of me to be filled immediately with equanimity, which worked.
Later I noticed I was spending little moments checking to see if I was in the fifth jhana by checking if the sensate field of the body was still appearing in consciousness. And again, this is a subtle, nonverbal example of the “Are we there yet?” habit mentioned earlier.
This separate little checking process was a counter intention to what I was trying to accomplish: the fifth jhana, where the boundaries of the body drop away. At this subtle level, the truth was that I lacked faith in the desired intention. The combination of intentions propagated in my experience averaged out to be the intention to fail. Once I realized this subtle lack of commitment was holding me back, I just intended for the entire space around me to be filled with equanimous void, and I was in the fifth.
Another subtle form of doubt is viewing experience through the lens that you need fixing, are going to fail, or that you’re a loser. I’m talking about a thin layer of tension blanketed over my shoulders and back of my head, nonverbal doubt, that became evident for me when I played around with wearing the lens– holding the assumption –that I was fine and that I was going to win.
A guided meditation that really helped me get a feel for wearing different perceptual lenses was Goldilocks Zone of Oneness by the Qualia Research Institute. In my experience, the light tension associated with this version of doubt dissolves as soon as it’s seen, but can creep up in the background of experience where I don’t notice it immediately.
One reframing that I like is that doubt is not the problem. Doubt is just your brain letting you know you’re bumping up against limiting beliefs or challenges. My mind doesn’t give me an itemized list of limiting beliefs and exact upper bounds of every skill I’m cultivating (...yet). It has to paint a cumulatively clearer picture of my cutting edge, with every brush stroke being a moment of doubt or failure.
If I’m not noticing failures or doubts some of the time, then how do I know I’m really growing? It’s possible to build evidence for growth without tallying doubts and failures, and tactics that do so can actually serve as a key building block in the foundation for jhana practice.
Celebrating savoring any little win, any experiment ran, or any triumph helps build the mental habits that support extended feelings of glee, joy, and contentment. I’ve done this at least hundreds of times: labeling doubt, congratulating myself for doing so, savoring the nice feeling resulting from congratulating. And I’ve written about how to build the skill of savoring positivity in experience here.
Lastly, I want to be clear that you can still experience jhanas that are profound, fun, and helpful for emotional processing without “solving” every example of doubt I’ve discussed, mostly it’s just the overt levels that need to be cleared.