Research confirms it. No self-help tool has more potential benefits for the mind, body, and spirit. Meditation promises “great liberation”, “great knowledge”, “great tranquility”. However, the big promise is rarely fulfilled.
The deficit lies in meditation methods that fail to control the wandering of the mind. With traditional methods, even with the best of intentions, one drifts and dreams when expecting care. Going around you don’t get far. This age-old problem now has a solution: a feedback method stops the wandering. Is that how it works.
The Feedback Method: A Straight Line to Success
Think of meditation like climbing a mountain. His goal is the summit. The fastest route to your goal is a straight line. With feedback to guide you, you’re going in a straight line. You meditate without wandering.
How to stop mind wandering with feedback
What is “feedback”? It is the knowledge of the results necessary for learning. When practicing darts, for example, seeing your target (feedback) allows you to correct your aim.
Traditional meditation is like throwing darts while blindfolded. Your goal is attention, but you cannot see your goal. The most important attention slips away unseen. You lose it without knowing that you are losing it. (You find out later when you wake up from a dream.)
Add feedback though, see what you’re doing, and the butterfly mind takes a bee line. With the feedback method, you see your goal: you see the attention itself. You are guided directly to your goal. This is how you do it.
How to Add Feedback to Meditation
Adding feedback to the meditation is easy since it’s already there! It’s the often-reported sensation of light and it’s been right in front of our eyes the whole time.
If you meditate with your eyes open, you may have seen it. Many have done it, but no one recognized its usefulness. We missed the fact that light is feedback; that signals attention; which is caused by attention itself.
Attention causes sensations of light when you keep your eyes still. When you look at a focus point, a stabilized retinal image uses photographic pigment that causes distortion in the form of light. Seeing the light confirms attention, and when you lose attention, the light disappears. Therefore, light is feedback, a means of self-guidance that makes meditation safe.
‘Seeing the light’: the new way of meditating
Focusing disks specially designed to facilitate feedback are available from the Straight Line Meditation website. To make a simple disk at home, draw a two-inch circle on a piece of paper. Add a pea-sized target. Place the puck on the ground a few feet in front of you and focus with a soft gaze on the center of the target. A halo of light will soon appear, indicating attention.
When the light appears, attend to it. If your mind wanders, your eyes will also wander and the light will fade. That is your cue to refocus on the target. Just focus; stick with the feedback and you’ll “see the light” in more ways than one. The light will guide you directly to your goal.
Straight Line Meditation
“Just sit,” says the Buddhist tradition, “eventually, perhaps after many lifetimes, you will find the truth.” The slow progress expected here means a lifetime of wandering the mountainside, never reaching the top. Slow progress goes with traditional meditation methods. A straight line, by contrast, covers the ground quickly. With the feedback method, the summit is in a straight line.