There Is No Perfect Way

A poem inspired by my students and my own practice of teaching mindfulness, reflecting the shared journey and universal challenges we face.

Photo by Sandra Martins on Unsplash

There is no right or wrong way,
No set goal to reach,
Nor score sheet to tick.

Time and again,
The mind will drift,
Thoughts will intrude,
Concentration flit.

To empty the mind,
Or not to empty the mind,
Or to become aware of things as they are—
Acknowledging whatever is:
“Thought” when a thought comes,
“Feeling” when a feeling floats by,
“Sensation” when a sensation arises.

So not to empty the mind,
But to become aware of what is,
Arising and passing as it is.

The mind will inevitably drift;
We acknowledge this,
As there is no perfect way to sit.
Just gently bringing attention back to the breath,
No matter if the mind drifts.

Rest assured, it will happen again—
That’s what the mind does:
It thinks, connects, and links the dots;
It is simply doing its job.
  
   - by Dr Clayton Micallef

Introduction: A universal challenge

From my own experience of practising and teaching mindfulness meditation, one of the greatest challenges I face and that students share is the struggle with the wandering mind. This is a universal challenge experienced by mindfulness practitioners and students, which often gives rise to the question of what constitutes “correct” practice.

Understanding the opening stanza: No right or wrong way

This is what inspired me to write this poem, “There is no perfect way,” as a tool for reflection that might offer insight into a universal struggle that both beginners and seasoned mindfulness practitioners experience during meditation.

This is why the poem starts with the statement: “There is no right or wrong way, / No set goal to reach, / Nor score sheet to tick.”

I also see this playing out in my own mindfulness meditation practice, how I might set specific goals that I have to reach in my mindfulness practice as a measure of how “mindful” I am, as the poem says in the first stanza - sitting there with a score sheet ticking off the goals as a metric of how successful I am in my practice.

This achievement-oriented mindset comes with the tendency to monitor how our practice is going in relation to our expectation of how it should go as a measure to quantify how successful I am - to reach and strive for a perfect practice. This can become a significant obstacle to cultivating mindfulness.

Why? Because rather than being with, present, and aware of our current experience without judgement, we would be actually striving to be other than where we are and, therefore, blind to our experience right now. This is if we tap directly into how mindfulness has been broadly defined as:

“Nonelaborative, non-judgmental, present-centred awareness in which each thought, feeling, or sensation that arises in the attentional field is acknowledged and accepted as it is.” (Bishop et al., 2004, p. 232)

So, the starting stanza of the poem directly addresses and dismantles any such expectations from the start. Where the poem invites us to take a gentler approach to mindfulness practice and how this striving for an ideal practice can get in the way. This is precisely why Jon Kabat-Zinn (2013) included non-striving as one of the seven foundational attitudes of mindfulness.

The wandering mind: A universal experience

The second stanza then moves into the common universal experience that both beginners and seasoned practitioners in meditation encounter: the wandering mind. “Time and again, / The mind will drift, / Thoughts will intrude, / Concentration flit.” These lines try to capture and acknowledge what every meditator discovers the moment they sit in practice – the natural tendency of the mind to move, shift, wander away and do its own thing.