Motivation to Meditate: Consciousness-raising about Goals and Four Kinds of Intent
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. ― C. G. Jung
What follows is a post-session response to a practitioner whom I've been guiding. Many, if not most, aspirants struggle with similar performance pressure, doubt, demotivation, or procrastination time and again on the path, especially before Stream Entry. If you struggle with any of these issues, then this article is for you. See also the previous related article, Introduction to Nuancing the Five Hindrances.
Typical Problems with Goals
One problem with focus on a goal is that rarely does anyone align a goal with his or her values. What follows from this norm is that most people loosely formulate goals based on either (1) gut feelings, or (2) comparison with others’ activities and achievements. Such bases of a goal are vulnerable because they bypass thinking and planning that is methodical. Goals formed methodically, rather than by gut feelings or emulation, are more amenable to operationalization. When operationalization seems impossible, it is often because the wrong goal is adopted.
But, even when the goal is the right goal for the person, the problem with reliance on “goals” to drive action is that they are abstract. “Enlightenment” is markedly abstract because it is something that people never directly experience until they do. “High realization” is quite the life-changer, but even it is something that remains markedly abstract until certain recognitions open and stabilize into realization. The abstract nature of a Big Ambitious Goal like enlightenment tends to introduce a problematic lack of focus on operationalizing that goal.
Why is this so? Well, overfocus on the Big Goal decouples it from operationalization not only because the goal is abstract, but also because its aura of ambition highlights a gap between current personal capacity and “success” in reaching the goal. This gap between current personal capacity and the Big Ambitious Goal drives motivation downward. This demotivating gap is a well-researched phenomenon.
In the context of Buddhist meditation practice, the scant focus on operationalization drives the practitioner in one of two directions: (1) toward finding a book or teacher to operationalize the enlightenment project, or (2) toward a rejection of “maps” and “goals” in favor of certain flavors of “instantaneous” enlightenment, of which Dzogchen direct introductions and Zen are two prominent examples currently in vogue in the West.
I suspect that your successful operationalization of 100+ days of Zen-based practice happened before you returned to me because Zen diminishes the burden of perceived gap between current capacity and ultimate outcomes. It does so by emphasizing the here and now to such an extent that “maps” (ie, methodical operationalization toward the Big Goal) are deemed superfluous or even counterproductive. Relieved of the burdensome knowledge of a gap, one can indeed then sit down and focus much better on the here and now.
The trouble, though, is that, without a project plan continually guiding operationalization, so much is left to dumb luck that the ultimate outcome desired remains unlikely, at least in this lifetime.
The Capacity Gap versus Operationalization
A step toward resolving the capacity-goal Gap Problem is to think deeply about the role of operationalization on the Path. For example, consider whether you automatically find yourself orienting to ultimate outcomes whenever map-based operationalization is reintroduced. Is Zen a relief because it seems to remove the need for operationalization of a goal? Zen can be great for many purposes, including practicing in a way that sheds performance pressure.
An alternative step toward resolution of the Gap Problem is to think hard about the claimed merits of having a map. Do these claims seem logical? If so, are there ways to reorient your focus on the Big Abstract Goal to operationalization instead?
One way to do so, according to research and conventional wisdom, is to break the Big Goal down into smaller interim goals. For example, some people make second jhana or the Knowledge of the Arising and Passing Away (A&P) their sole goal, because these goals are achievable with current capacity. Once the A&P is crossed, then a new interim goal can be embraced: Theravadin Stream Entry. And so on.
Even within the interim goal of Stream Entry exist subordinate insight objectives and subattainments. To the extent that goal-orientation must remain a feature of any map-based path of practice, you can relieve performance pressure by studying and understanding the logic of the proposed map. This study is the cognitive and pedagogical basis of map buy-in, which is necessary if Zen or direct whatever is not the chosen alternative.
After buy-in, though, it helps to focus as exclusively as possible on the operationalization toward the next immediate interim goal, whether that goal be a subattainment or mastery of a subskill. A mappy teacher who has traveled the path to Dzochen realization can help shift your orientation to operationalization by relieving you of both Big Goal focus and decisions about what should be the next interim goal, subattainment, or skill.
Setting an interim goal closer to your current baseline capacity decreases the pressure and helplessness you feel when your awareness registers as gap between your baseline and the Big Goal.
Problematic Goal versus Problematic Intent
How and why did you formulate your goal of enlightenment? How, under what circumstances, did you first land on the idea of entering the Path? Were you looking at others’ meditative achievements as achievement? Were you noticing in stream enterers signs of happiness, of stress reduction, or of behavioral improvements? Did the goal formation emerge as a natural extension of your psychotherapy or of your conquering addiction to alcohol?
How you arrived at the goal of enlightenment and made it your own is worth migrating from implicit memory to conscious understanding.
You stated without hesitation yesterday that you want to keep your enlightenment goal. But, when asked, you hesitated to affirm that you have genuine intent to move toward that goal. This discrepancy between your firm goal and your ambivalent intent is interesting, isn’t it?
Logically speaking, you either do intend to move toward the goal, or the goal is not really your own carefully considered and methodically formulated goal. Perhaps it is an abstraction, or perhaps it is an emulated goal made to seem valuable by external drivers?
If, as you said yesterday, the goal is the “prize at the end,” whereas the intent is the “hard work” necessary to get ever closer to the prize at the end, is there a realistic scenario in which the prize is somehow attainable without treading a path toward it?
The gap between confirming your wish to keep your goal, on the one hand, and your ambivalence around intent to activate toward the goal, on the other hand, might seem to suggest that your goal is appropriated fantasy or the artifact of socialization.
But, alternatively, the gap between desired goal and driving intent may seem to suggest that it is your operationalizing intent, not the goal, that is weak; however, we saw that your intent was impressively strong for 100+ days. I saw your long journal entries packed with insight. You did have intent during those 100+ Zen days. You activated yourself toward the goal, and you experienced and journaled great insights. Perhaps Zen’s deemphasis of the Big Remote Goal removed something “in the way” of your freely experiencing driving intent.
Moreover, we know that currently you sense resistance when faced with a morning sit. Resistance implies that there are two competing intents rather than one intent that is simply “weak.”
So far, it seems that your capacity to operationalize the path is strong, whereas the end-goal orientation is vague, ambitious, intrusive, and demotivating. That is, the goal is not sufficient to drive behavior—in fact, it is paralysing. And this makes sense, yes? Goals never drive behavior, for they are abstractions remote from the present moment. Only intent drives action, and intent is of the present moment, the moment of decision whether to sit.
This observation doesn’t mean that goal-free, mapless practice is the solution. The goal, broken down into achievable interim objectives, provides the pedagogical framework that informs application of method. Understanding the framework also leads to buy-in, trust.
The Importance of Four Types of Intent
So, to recap: It is only intent that activates behavior toward a goal. When two intents compete for current activation, what emerges is resistance. It is crucial to bring into your conscious awareness the costs—not just the benefits—of each of the two competing intents. Otherwise, you risk taking refuge in avoidance (ignorance).
Most of the time, most advice-givers will emphasize only the benefits of x option. Many Dharma colleagues will try to convince you, for example, that daily practice has only upsides. Actually, daily practice incurs significant costs. It is important for both of us to acknowledge this fact.
At the beginning of Daniel’s book, MCTB, he issues a dramatic warning for those formulating a goal to enter a path driven by fierce intent. He spells out major downsides of acting on the goal. His doing so is only ethical, and I follow in his footsteps in this regard.
One of the costs that we conversed about yesterday is that resuming a daily practice of “bearing with suffering” threatens your competing intent to protect yourself from suffering. And the cost is not only, or even primarily, the suffering that the method itself (ie, third-chakra practice) might surface.
Its cost is also the suffering that comes from confronting discontinuation of an impressive run of 100+ days of practice and having to now decide every day whether to risk resumption. You explained that this second source of suffering comes from implicit memory of being “not enough” when assessed against some external goal post of achievement—the gifted child syndrome.
Figure 1, adapted from a Healthy Gamer training-the-trainers session by psychiatrist Alok Kanojia, maps types of intent into four quadrants. The x-axis distinguishes external orientation to find value, on the one hand, from internal orientation to find value, on the other hand. The y-axis differentiates what feels predominantly rewarding from what feels predominantly taxing.
Figure 1. The Four Types of Intent: “Shoulds,” Desires, Duties, and Values
Most people live their lives chiefly oriented toward external validation (left half of the grid). On that left half, the shoulds, being demanding and costly, easily lose to a competing desire. For example, “I should get up and exercise for 30 minutes before work” (costly) will easily lose to “I want to sleep in this nice warm bed for 30 more minutes before working” (gainful).
For a person whose intentions form around external promises of reward, desire is going to be the default type of intent, whereas competing “shoulds” are prone to losing the competition because of their much heavier cost on the external-validation side of the grid. After all, no one needs to even form a goal, let alone muster intent, to sleep in late or eat a yummy donut: The gains are immediate, and any costs are deferred and easily suppressed from present consciousness.
By contrast, when a person lives oriented toward his or her internal self-validation (right half of the grid), then core values can more easily trump even strong desires that can be immediately gratified. This relative ease in trumping desire is because those core values go to identity, to one’s own inner atmosphere and congruent self-representation.
Even in the top half of the grid, fulfilling duties toward others, although costly, will reinforce positive self-image and therefore often outcompete superficial desire.
The hardest intent to sustain is in the upper left quadrant, the shoulds. The orientation of an “I should” statement is toward external standards, validation, and rewards. It is also predominantly costly. It is not a “feel good” intent, because it is insufficiently anchored in one’s positive inner atmosphere (identity) and therefore isn’t immediately sensed as positively enhancing the self-representation.
“I should” is decoupled from positive self-regard as a basis of intent and as a goal. Therefore, its predominant valence is aversion.
Solutions to Ambivalence
“I should sit,” the sentence you repeated yesterday as one that arises every morning, is a sign of reluctance to sit. It is a sign that intention to sit, although present, can easily lose to any one of the other three types of intent on any given morning.
Instead of sitting, you could scroll on your phone (desire). Instead of sitting, you could dedicate time to your spouse or emptying the dishwasher (duty). Instead of sitting, you could maintain your good health and athletic physique with a bike ride (established core values).
The first task in shifting motivation may surprise you. It is to bring the costliness of the upper half of the grid into conscious awareness and full acknowledgment. You cannot overcome or compete with something that remains hidden instead of out on the table and under the plain light of day.
When it comes to the bravery required to sit with suffering, it helps to acknowledge that it will cost you. And even when you do sit anyway, one of the Three Characteristics that you will be continually facing and working with is suffering. Again, even the “content” of the intended activity will cost you.
If the path were not hard, then bravery would not be required. Bravery is required. The good news is that bravery can become a core value, but only if costliness is not suppressed or bypassed but cleanly seen, acknowledged, and chosen.
After the upper (cost) half of the grid is brought into conscious awareness, then a later phase of intent revision is to bring the left half of the grid, external orientation, into conscious awareness. This shift may prove a subtler affair than the shift of cost into consciousness, but your internal family systems work can help you discern where your shoulds are coming from, what standards external to yourself rule your intent formulation.
This self-knowledge transforms implicit memory into explicit memory. Such consciousness-raising will elicit in you a sense of choice and agency. Choice and agency naturally align your drives with core values, which are yours alone and which are therefore intrinsically more valuable than costly. In this way, sitting may become a way that you value yourself above whatever the sit costs.
This is a gradual journey from the upper left quadrant to the lower right quadrant. Notice that revising intent has nothing to do with focusing on the Big Goal of enlightenment. The goal in revising intent is more immediate: It is to feel agency and thus enjoy choice, power, and achievement by sitting down to practice.
Application of the Solution
Instead of unconsciously being lured away from the meditation seat and away from even the decision whether to sit, try consciously weighing the upsides against the downsides of sitting today.
In making your decision, be wary of framing emotional consequences in terms of the Big Ambitious End-Goal, which is a mirage. Instead consider the emotional consequences of “sitting most days” for at least 20 minutes. How will you feel later today and tomorrow if you do not sit, as opposed to if you do?
Make a fully conscious decision between the upsides/downsides of practicing today, and the upsides/downsides of protecting yourself from possible feelings of “pressure” and feelings of “helplessness.”
There is not a “wrong” decision here. The trick is to decide which of the binary options you truly want today. Be conscious of your ability and right to choose that option independently. Then you own it and get to live fully in consequences of your own decision, which has the merit of being no one else’s imposed decision.
“Shoulds” and outsiders’ directives or advice to practice will only amplify your reluctance. The first level of cutting through the source of reluctance, the feelings of “pressure” and “helplessness,” is to notice the reluctance and then to do what you really want to do today.
You may choose differently on another day, so you are in no way trapped by today’s decision. The long path from your baseline to the end-goal is not binary; only today’s decision whether to practice is binary. The breakout liberation from feelings of pressure and entrapment, which underlie reluctance, is your agency—your unfettered, conscious, clean choice.
Welcome! I’m Jenny. Back in 1982, at the age of 19, I began studying Eastern philosophy and doctrine. In the late 1990s, I authored a 400-page doctoral dissertation comparing Zen koan aporias to the deconstructive rhetoric of silence in modern American texts—an East-West interface that still informs my teaching and writings today.
2010 marked the beginning of my formal Buddhist meditation practice. After engaging Theravadin practices in late 2013, Stream Entry quickly happened in August 2014. Mahamudra Fourth Yoga stabilized in July 2015. I then began practicing within the Bon Dzogchen tradition and began writing content now informing The Critical Path to Awakening (forthcoming). In 2017, I founded Axis Mundi Awakening to offer an intensive whole-path Buddhist awakening program to select, highly motivated students. Interested to learn more? See my teaching approach and curriculum overview.