An interest phenomenon occurs anytime we sit down and meditate to cultivate more positive qualities of mind and heart. Rather than experience those positive qualities themselves, we often feel quite the opposite.
We sit on our meditation cushion to watch our breath but are unable to follow it for even a few seconds. We sit to be mindful and spend twenty minutes being totally aimless. We sit to find peace, only to discover our mind is completely all over the place. Our thoughts shift from the million things we left to do on our to-do list, to that one time last month we were insulted by another person, to worries about getting cancer or the climate ending, to the dust that needs sweeping and the dishes that need to be washed. This makes us frustrated and often angry, the exact opposite of what we think we “should” be experiencing.
Contrary to popular notions around what meditation is supposed to be, this is by design. It is, in fact, the point. Whether we like it or now, we cannot grow without experiencing some difficulty. Meditation isn’t there to show us sunshine and rainbows, its there to show us exactly where we are stuck.
There’s no escape from your own mind
This truth can come as quite a surprise for those that come to spiritual practice in order to avoid their own issues. Many young practitioners experience challenges in their work, family, or love lives, and seek to go on a “retreat” away from it all to meditate and find peace. They spend a lot of money to go to a nice fancy retreat center in paradise and as soon as they sit down to watch their thoughts, all the mind wants to think about is the challenges around work, family, and love.
I have experienced this first hand. One of my favorite meditations to practice now is what is known as metta, or loving-kindness. A standard metta meditation is designed to cultivate feelings of kindness and goodwill to others. You start by extending your loving kindness to a loved one, dear friend, or a pet. Then you think of a friend, then an acquaintance, then a stranger, and someone who rubs you the wrong way, before finally shifting your attention to an “enemy” or something you have a strong resistance towards.
The point is to begin by “greasing the wheels” of the heart by loving people in your life that are easy to love. Then you have to progress to incrementally more challenging people. The final step is to look at exactly where you are stuck and what you are holding onto that prevents love from flourishing.
When I first started to do metta meditations, I had an incredibly hard time. Actually, I remember tears falling from my eyes the first time I did it, as I realized all the people that I was withholding my love from. I realized I wasn’t the unconditionally loving person I thought I was.
And again, that is the point. We must be able to meet our obstacles head on in order to free ourselves from them. As Rumi so famously put it, “your task is not to seek for love, but to remove all the obstacles against it.” To attain most things in life, we must first learn what is getting in the way.
To put it a different way, it was Dr. Christopher Germer, the creator of Mindful Self Compassion (along with self-compassion researcher Dr. Kristin Neff), who popularized the phrase, love reveals everything unlike itself. Our attempts to cultivate an open-hearted unconditional love will reveal all that is not love and all that is standing in the way. Thus it is completely normal to sit for 30 minutes of a loving-kindness or compassion meditation and actually feel quite the opposite of loving-kindness or compassion. We are being show exactly where it is we are the most stuck, so that we can learn and grow from it. Another way to put it is, “When we give ourselves unconditional love, we discover the conditions under which we were unloved.”
The darkness shows us the light
A huge reason for this struggle to grow is found in the reality of duality. The mind, and in turn, our language, is inherently dual in its understanding of the world. In order to talk about or think about anything, we must create an artificial separation of concepts, which are always interdependent. Our happiness is only known in relation to sadness, goodness to evil, and light to dark. In order to truly understand one, we must fully understand the other. It was Carl Jung who famously quipped, “In order to know the light, we must first experience the darkness.”
Thus the spiritual path is not simply feeling happiness, joy, and ecstasy all the time. It’s actually quite the opposite. It is cultivating the courage of a warrior who has no fear of going into the darkest of places and facing the suffering of life. Again we can find this confirmed by Carl Jung who observed “one does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
Suffering must be digested, must be synthesized, and used for growth. It is not dissimilar to how we use the waste of animals as fertilizer. We also can “digest” the proverbial “shit” in our life in order to grow. In fact, we cannot have one without the other, hence the famous quote by Thich Nhaht Hanh, “no mud, no lotus.”
Imagine if you went to a doctor to remove a tumor, but the doctor only knew about how to exercise and eat right. They do not have any actual knowledge of tumors or how to remove them because in their mind, “it is best to avoid it.” Well, they would not be a very good doctor now, would they? Unfortunately, that is exactly how many spiritual practitioners fall into the trap of spiritual bypassing, with an unconscious belief that spiritual practice can be used to avoid any mental or emotional suffering. But it doesn’t work that way. As the saying goes, “what we resist, persists,” and that cancer will continue to grow if we do not address it.
The pain is in the medicine
This is another reason why love is one of the most powerful forces in the world, because in our practice of love, we see everything that is standing in the way of love. Love reveals everything unlike itself, from racism to sexism to a system of capitalistic materialism that puts money and things over people and connection, we can immediately recognize the deeply entrenched disconnection that runs rampant in the world. Loneliness is an epidemic in this modern world, and if we are to bring more love into our lives, we must address it. As Sadhguru put it, “Too many people are hungry not because there is a dearth of food. It is because there is the dearth of love and care in human hearts.”
I like to teach that the four P’s of meditation are: place, posture, practice, and the best one: problems. The problems are grist for the mill, fertilizer for our awakening, darkness designed to highlight and teach us about the light. No path will match the potential for growth as the path of unconditional love and goodwill for all beings, including yourself.
Your path of self love will bring up all the grief, loneliness, longing, anger, fear, and self-doubt that gets in the way. You will see all the ways you have been treated in the past, both personally and culturally, get in the way of loving and accepting yourself just as you are.
This is something that comes up a lot in mindful self compassion trainings. Participants come to practice the beautiful experience that is compassion, only to find themselves feeling bad. The light is finally shining on the darkness, and it’s normal to not want to face it. But we must. The alcohol is finally disinfecting the wound and there will be some pain as a result.
As experienced meditators we become like surgeons in our mind, recognizing the pain that will arise from the incisions. This pain is necessary for us to remove the feelings of hatred, greed, jealousy, and ill-will that prevent love from flourishing.
So if you too have experienced problems in your practice, don’t fret. They are there by design. Love reveals everything unlike itself.
