The problem with meditation

If I had called this reflection The promise of meditation, I am not sure you would be reading it. It’s surprisingly difficult to find the time to start a meditation practice and just as hard to maintain one, so perhaps the problems we associate with it in our minds are the permission we give ourselves not to bother.

I am going on a week-long silent meditation retreat later this month. In the past, when I have attended a retreat like this, I got basically two responses: “That sounds lovely” and “Rather you than me”. They are both right and both wrong. Meditation is delightful and awful and everything in between. Those who have tried meditation for a while can encounter a whole range of imperfect experiences, and for beginners, this often leads them to the conclusion that they are just bad at it. If you stick with the practice long enough, you will likely learn that all of those imperfect experiences are very normal, and some might therefore be more tolerable. But still, the reasons not to meditate abound.

My biggest challenge early on was wrestling with the idea that I needed to maintain a perfect posture. The searing pain I was experiencing in my shoulder blades meant that I would never be able to do this properly, despite my best intentions, and this was incredibly disappointing and frustrating. There is so much here, but let’s start with the pain in the shoulders. No doubt, my decades of desk-jockey work and poor posture have contributed to a body that is not as trained as it could be for sitting on the floor for extended periods. Just sit on a chair, meditation-loving friends would say. Sure, but that felt like giving up to me. I let go of that, but the shoulder pain would still happen in a chair. I was so frustrated with it all that, at my first home retreat, I cried about it. Eventually, I learned from teachers and my own practice that the frustration was significantly compounding the bodily discomfort. My mental tension about it was causing me to be physically tense around the pain. My mind could not focus on anything else.

Around this time, I came up with the idea that there is tension in attention. When we focus on something in such a narrow way, there is inevitably a holding on or tension experienced in the body.

Once I became aware of my own resistance to the shoulder pain, I was able to relax just enough to know that the shoulder blade was tight, but that it wasn’t something I needed to fight. I permitted myself to be a meditator with a sore shoulder, and that was ok. Not all pain should be completely ignored, of course. In our lives, we need to respond wisely to our bodies. In meditation, whatever is present can always benefit from more kindness.

Physical pain may not be the case for everyone else’s first experience. What I more often hear from beginners is that they just can’t still their restless minds. They are planning their shopping or realizing they need to go to the bank, or whatever other random thoughts pop up in a constant stream of chatter. Sometimes those thoughts have enough energy to cause you to want to get up, take action, and finish the meditation. This is all very normal. Just like me, these people had expectations about how meditation would be, and this was not it. Here, meditation teachers play an important role.

For beginners, I would recommend doing more guided meditation early on in practice. A good teacher will reinforce how normal these thought streams are and support you in training your mind to gently notice them and kindly resettle on something in the present-moment experience, like your own breathing.

It feels like a distant memory, but I do seem to recall that I once thought guided meditations were cheating, too. Gosh, it is amazing how much our perfectionist, performance culture influences everything!

Another very common experience I see is that when people are comfortable enough to relax, they fall asleep or get drowsy in meditation. Trust me, I love napping; it’s wonderful. It’s not quite meditation, though. In meditation, a balance is needed between being relaxed enough to be comfortable and being alert enough to notice what is happening in your experience. It’s not a time to check out, it’s actually a whole lot more connected to your moment-to-moment experience than that, and that by itself can open up so much to discover. Meditation teacher Gullu Singh puts it this way:

When we start to meditate it can seem like we are caught in a swirl of activity - mind racing, restlessness, anxiety. As we relax into the stillness and hold these energies in awareness, they begin to settle. In this settling, a whole new world is revealed.

Gullu Singh

There is a lot we are carrying emotionally as human beings. Concerns about our own health or circumstances, the well-being of our families and communities, and the ever-present global and societal challenges that seem to loom so imminently, all add up to a big mental load that can be exhausting. At least where I live in the United States, we are also working really hard and consuming information in an always-on, always-stimulated, demanding culture. No wonder we nod off when we are invited to sit still for a few minutes. As I said, there’s nothing wrong with sleeping, but it can get in the way of meditation practice if we are chronically tired. Early on, I would recommend adding a meditation early in the morning or at a time of day when we are alert. After lunch is probably not a good idea. We can aim for more ideal conditions, but being tired or drowsy is a function of life; it is not a measure of your meditation performance.

Less common in early practice, but still the case, people can have a very positive experience in meditation. They can feel relaxed, spacious, peaceful, and occasionally even blissed out. This is lovely and seems to be the average, though somewhat uninformed, perspective that defines “good” meditation. What a contrast to our normal and difficult life and work, “Why don’t I do this more often?” they might say. There is a bit of risk here, too. Such "states” in meditation are no more or less important than the mental activity of our difficulties; what’s important is the quality of awareness that we can bring to either. Whatever is happening on this day, in this meditation, is what is happening, and most (if not all) of it has nothing to do with us. It is simply happening. So, when we experience pleasantness in meditation, a temptation is to want it to be like that all the time, which can itself lead to a sense of dissatisfaction, frustration, and self-judgement if we can’t find our way to peace this time.

Whatever our meditation experience happens to be, as long as we continue to find it frustrating, wrong, or imperfect in some way, we may start to doubt whether it’s worth the effort versus some other personal goal we have set ourselves. What is this all for anyway? It can take quite a long time for meditation to be practiced without trying to do anything particular other than to spend some quality time training the mind. Meditation teacher Philip Moffitt speaks of practicing practice, not practicing results, which I find to be so generous and forgiving in a world of high expectations that can accidentally spill over into this setting. I have come to understand that the problems we encounter in meditation are not things to be fixed but things to be understood. They ARE meditation. On the surface, perhaps that doesn’t sound much fun, yet despite all of this, a regular practice is worth some of your time. While life may not get any easier, meditation can become a little less challenging if we approach it with a kind, curious, and open mind.

If you can spend a little time each day just being open to your lived experience, including your fears, doubts, restlessness, sleepiness, desires, and resistances for a few minutes without letting them overtake you, that is a win in my view. In this way, over time, when we meditate, we are developing a much-needed capacity for human thriving in a chaotic world.

Try it out for yourself.