Against Ikea-Brain
Or at least to balance it out
I think of it as the “Kingsley-Headspace Spectrum.”
Headspace is the beginners meditation app, of course. It gives clear, direct instructions, moment by moment, step by step. You put in your headphones, and a voice guides you moment-by-moment through the inner tinkering.
Peter Kingsley is a classics scholar and mystic; he writes about the under-attended mystical tradition of the western world, his voice emerging from deep experience in that tradition. The only practice instruction I’ve ever heard from him is “go to a sacred place, lie down, and die.”
Those are the basic ends of the spectrum. You can hold someone’s hand at every single step — even to the point of talking in their ear while they ‘meditate’ — or you can give a couple gnomic phrases and refuse to elaborate.
Each side of the spectrum has its uses and its fans.
I tend towards the Kingsley side of the spectrum, but I dabble Headspace-wards. In my Somatic Resonance course, the main page for somatic meditation practice tries to marry both approaches: I give a couple of phrases as basic instructions to start with; once you’ve practiced with those, you can come back, click on the basic instructions, and they expand into slightly more detailed advice; when you practice with those and come back, you can click deeper again for slightly more detailed advice. It seemed like a decent compromise to me, and I’ve gotten a lot of compliments on the approach.
Koans are more on the Kingsley end of the spectrum, as I see it. But despite a few speckles of Kingsley-ism here and there, the worlds of meditation, personal growth, and spiritual practice are overwhelmingly tilted towards Headspace.
I’ve often thought that a nearly ideal default approach would be to work with a teacher one-on-one, and the teacher would give you a couple of phrases, a couple of pointers, and send you off into the woods to work with them until something happened one way or another — whether that’s a flash of insight, or a simmer of frustration turning into a boil — at which point you can come back, talk with them about what happened, and they can send you back off again.
No numbered step-by-step lists, no metronomes to count your breath length by, no hypnotic lull of “you notice your thoughts drifting by; your awareness becomes more detached from those thoughts.”
The way I see it, there’s a discernment problem at play. Or a problem with one’s mode of experience.
One way I might put it is that step-by-step engineering instructions are a very left-brained approach to the whole endeavor — and whether you’re going after enlightenment or inner peace or attachment style repair or radiant love for all beings, almost nothing that you’re looking for in practices like this have their roots in the left hemisphere’s mode of experience. This mode that wants precision, certainty, narrowed focus, control, abstraction, and repeatability… that part of you doesn’t do the kind of spontaneous, radiant experience that leads to renewed consciousness of yourself and the world around you.
If you don’t have any other starting point available to you, except for this kind of approach, then by all means start there. But getting stuck there is not just a rare danger, but a fairly common outcome. “Dismantling the master’s house with the master’s tools” is a neat idea, but not a thing that really happens particularly often.
Being forced to break yourself against something simple is surprisingly effective.
If a teacher just says to you “break the sky open with your love” and refuses to elaborate, what do you do? If you truly believe that the teacher has wisdom to share, and that following their instructions is a way to gain that wisdom if you do it well, how do you break the sky open with your love after they walk away?
We’d each have a different process, I think, but that process would likely take us through the realms of thinking (“what does that even mean?? is it code for something?”), feeling (“trigger the most powerful love possible, how can I stoke the furnace of love, I can almost feel it”), embodiment (this warmth in the chest, this grin that takes over my face, let it grow, let it all buzz and burn upward), raw awareness (beneath the steam of embodied effort, the central ego dissolves, there is only sky-deep is-ness), and any number of other areas.
You’d have to take a (frustrating, joyful, unexpected) trip through unfamiliar regions of experience to reach something like breaking the sky with love — and once you did it, you could go back to the teacher, tell them what happened, and they could see the directions your own intuition and discernment took you in, the tendencies you have when left alone to break yourself against something simple.
And over time, you’d learn another skill, a necessary meta-skill in all this: the ability to drop into that intuitive, discerning space and live from there when needed.
Once you’re in that space, almost anything can lead you further, if you give it serious care. You could scroll quote images on Pinterest, pick any one and random, and have your world rocked by the profundity of what you find there.
Your world will be rocked, not because the message is so insightful and fresh and well-written or anything like that — but because the motions your soul makes while exploring it show you something about your reality.
You wouldn’t get anything out of a Headspace narration of how to meditate on the idea. You wouldn’t get much out of dismissing it as trite or simple (even it it’s both).
This is part of why I don’t do a lot of guided meditations, and why I do very little 1:1 coaching work with people. A lot of what folks expect is something in the Headspace region of the spectrum. They want clear, direct instructions to follow, they want ideas handed to them that they can turn into implementable action items.
And to me, the limits of that are too clear, and not really what I’m interested in. I’d rather send you off with a cheesy Pinterest quote, ask you to weave it into your soul for the next week or two, and then hear from you when you have something to say about it.
It’s not about coaching someone in what to do, how to live, who to be — it’s about coaxing their soul to move in interesting ways.
It’s not about placing someone on a map, and giving them a route to follow — it’s about dropping them in strange territory and letting them surprise themselves with what they’re capable of, with what they find.
As with everything, a good mixture will get the job done best. But in a world that tilts so very, very, very hard towards the step-by-step Headspace side of the spectrum, I’m happy to pick up the reigns on Kingsley’s side of the spectrum now and again.
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I also do a bit of 1:1 coaxing work, if this article sounds good to you — but are you sure that’s what you’re looking for?
“go to a sacred place, lie down, and die” goes so hard lol