Meditation
My hapkido grandmaster stressed the importance of danjun breathing and meditation as integral to martial arts and life in general. I discovered that, when I meditated daily, I got a lot better at sparring, which really got me thinking. Around 2000, I started reading about Buddhism and exploring different meditation techniques. I eventually got into a particular kind of mindfulness meditation called Vipassana. After studying this for a while, I traveled to South Korea and spend 5 days in a Buddhist monastery that combined meditation and a traditional monastic lifestyle with intense martial arts practice (like a Korean version of the Shaolin temple). That was extremely interesting and I learned a lot (including that sleeping on a blanket placed on a concrete floor is not for old guys).
I now consider myself Buddhish, which is to say I think the basic insights of Buddhism are both correct and extremely useful in living a happy life. But I view them as more of a psycho-philosophical system than a religion in the traditional sense. Thus, I reject a lot of the religious trappings like going to temple, spinning wheels, saying prayers, etc. Don't get me wrong: these can all be explained in terms of classical Buddhist theory without religious metaphysics, but people have a hard time staying on that path and so Buddhism is becoming more and more overtly "religious". A more subtle problem, in my view, is that when people begin to do meditation, they are drawn to the metaphysical explanations about what they are doing. Thus, people who haven't been meditating more than a couple of hours will ask me about "the void" and chat about whether they have experienced it or not. They haven't. If there is such a thing (about which I am ambivalent), it's not something you experience without thousands and thousands of hours of meditative practice. Asian traditions tend to stress that mastering things (whether martial arts or calligraphy or meditation) takes a very, very long time and the skills and insights involved are subtle and hard to communicate in words. When these traditions meet the West, they are often "dumbed down" to appeal to Western customers, and lose much in the translation. There is a saying in martial arts: practice a form 1,000 times and you can see what you are doing; practice it 10,000 times and your audience can see. But what American 10 year old is going to take martial arts if you tell them this at the outset?
When it comes to meditation, westerners often want a quick and easy way to inject meaning into their lives and, by insisting on this, ruin their chances of injecting meaning in a way that will stick (sigh). The bottom line is that most amateurs think meditation has to have this secret aspect that connects you to the ultimate immediately, which is total bullshit. It's also ultimately counterproductive, since people who are not willing to deceive themselves will quickly get frustrated that they haven't walked the void after a whole 100 hours of trying and quit. Of course, it's not all the fault of westerners, since a lot of these traditions cling to pre-scientific theories like chakras and chi. That said, I will note again that there is often something to these ideas, just not what people think. I have seen chi work, for example - I just attribute it to a powerful psychological effect, not the flow of some mysterious "energy".
So what do you gain relatively quickly from regular meditation? Patience. Calm. The ability to put events in your life into a broader perspective. Lowered blood pressure. Decrease in stress. To my mind, this is more than enough to justify it as a daily practice, and you can worry about the metaphysics later on when you have a better idea what you are doing (if this interests you).
In any event, for several years I taught a Buddhist meditation leisure skills class. I put my notes online here. These provide a series of exercises to teach Vipassana meditation in 14 weeks, along with a Smithian discussion of the Buddhist principles behind it all. The idea is to give you enough of an idea about why you are doing what you are doing to know what to look for and put it into a large context, but not so much that you are spouting philosophical nonsense you don't understand. It's just a beginning, but I think a pretty good one...
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