What happens when you stop counting

My first teacher gave us breath-counting as a beginner's tool. You count to ten on the exhales, then start again at one. If you lose track, no problem: start at one again. The counting gives the mind something to do, which is useful, because the mind without something to do is very loud.

I used this for three years. It worked. By the end of the second year I could sit for forty minutes without losing the count, which I quietly considered an accomplishment, in the way one quietly considers anything an accomplishment that has no audience.

Then, in the third year, my teacher (different teacher, by then) said offhandedly that the counting was a scaffold and at some point it had to come down. The scaffold was not the building. Most people, she said, kept the scaffold up forever, and built their meditation entirely around the counting, and then wondered why the meditation never quite arrived.

The first month without it

It was a disaster. I sat. The mind went everywhere. There was no count to come back to, only the breath itself, which is much subtler than a number, and which is much easier for the mind to walk away from. In ten minutes of sitting I could leave and return forty times, instead of the four or five it had taken with the counting.

I assumed I had gone backwards. I had not. I had simply lost the scaffold, and the building had to learn to stand on its own.

The second month

Something started to happen that the counting had been hiding. Without a number to attach to, my attention was on the breath itself — the specific texture of one inhale, the slightly different texture of the next, the small pauses at the top and bottom. The breaths started to differentiate. The fifth inhale of a sit was not the same as the seventh. They were different breaths, with different qualities, and I was noticing this for the first time.

I had been counting for three years and had not, in any meaningful way, paid attention to a single breath. The counting had been the practice. The breath had been the medium of the counting. Without the counting, the medium became the message.

The third month

Something else started to happen, which is harder to write about. The space between the breaths — the pause at the top of the inhale, the pause at the bottom of the exhale — became visible. They had been there the whole time, of course. I had not been there for them.

The pauses are not nothing. They are something specific, and quiet, and important. I do not know how to describe them better than that, but I will say that everything I had been doing in meditation up to that point had been about the breaths, and that almost everything that has happened in my meditation since then has been about the pauses.

The scaffold makes the building possible. It also hides the building from you, for as long as it is up.

What I tell students now

If you are starting meditation, count. Genuinely. The counting is good. It gives the mind a job, and the job is the part most beginners need most. Without the counting, the first months are very hard.

If you have been counting for a year, try a week without. Notice what happens. The chaos that arrives is information. You will be tempted to go back to the counting. Don't, yet. Sit through the chaos for a few weeks. See what stabilises.

If you have been counting for five years, you might be holding on to a scaffold that finished its job years ago, and the scaffold might be the reason the practice has plateaued. I'd very gently invite you to test this. The practice underneath is, in my experience, much more interesting than the practice on top.

One last note

None of this is universal. Some traditions count for life, and the counting is the practice, and the practice is the practice. I am not arguing with those traditions. I am describing what happened to me, in the kind of meditation I do, when I put down the tool I had been using for three years.

If your tool is still serving you, keep it. If it stopped serving you a year ago and you have not noticed, this post is for you. That was me, until a sentence from a teacher made it not be.

This closes a small set of posts about beginning and continuing. Next month I want to write about the part of meditation no one warns you about, which is what happens around year five.