[nativecoinc]

There are some teachers of Samatha meditation, a Buddhist concentration meditation, that teach that you at any point are meditating at one of ten stages. This is both about skill as well as about factors like how agitated your mind is in general. And these stages seem to have very well-defined descriptions: for example one stage might be differentiated from the previous one by overcoming drowsiness. This is very helpful since some people teach meditation by just telling you how to do it but not (in fact sometimes actively avoiding) how you can evaluate where you are and how you are doing. Then the practice becomes just about “being present” and other slogans that might be wholly non-actionable.

It’s also very difficult to protest this kind of approach (edit: the non-goal approach) since merely mentioning things like "goal" or "evaluation" will trigger someone’s knee-jerk you’re-doing-it-wrong reaction, even though what they practice might be completely different to what you are doing or trying to achieve.