One of the greatest misconceptions I have found about the practice of meditation is that it is supposed to be easy. A huge reason for this is the abundance of workshops, classes, and apps that advertise meditation as simply a relaxation technique. Many people are even told by their meditation teachers that all they need to do to feel total bliss and oneness with the universe is to slow down and listen to their breath.
When meditation is advertised as a way to become present and find peace, it can be extraordinarily discouraging when we can’t seem to find peace in our practice. People think they are “bad meditators” or “not doing it right” if they experience discomfort during meditation.
When this occurs, I like to remind my students of what are known as the four P’s of meditation: place, posture, practice, and the most important one: problems.
Problems are actually an essential part of the practice for everyone from beginners to experienced meditators. This is because, in reality, after just a few minutes of sitting down and trying to be with our breath, we can encounter an extensive litany of problems. Our body starts to ache. We feel pain in our hips, lower back, or knees. Our mind gets anxious, bored, or distracted. We may even feel anger bubbling up or frustration over how our meditation progress is going.
In fact if anything, we are conditioned to not be happy in this moment. Our modern world thrives on dissatisfaction. Every advertisement put out into the world, including those popular meditation apps, expresses the same message, “you are suffering, so buy this thing to feel better.” After all, a populace that is happy with very little is not very good for business.
It was the meditation teacher David Nichtern who observed,
The idea of dropping our thoughts of past and future and allowing ourselves to be awake and present is a very radical idea. Our society has a tremendous engine for creating dissatisfaction, desire, and craving.
Happiness is going to be this, it’s going to be that, but it’s never going to be just enjoying yourself where you are and as you are. For most of us, cultivating simplicity and contentment might take some real effort.
While it may seem like the many crises of modernity are the underlying causes of our challenge in remaining still and finding peace, experiencing problems in meditation is not a new thing at all.
A few millennia ago, the great yogic sage Patanjali used two full sutras to list out all the problems a meditator might encounter. In Sutras 1.30, he identifies issues like disease, idleness, doubt, carelessness, sloth, lack of detachment, misapprehension, failure to attain a base for concentration, and instability. In the next sutra, Patanjali expands even further by adding distress, despair, trembling of the body, and disturbed breathing to the list of potential problems.
Although it may be tempting to want to push away these problems or to think that we are “bad meditators” for encountering them, these problems are actually the point of the practice. That is because, in meditation, we are trying to increase our capacity to be with what is. We are also learning to observe our own mental patterns so that we can let go of the processes that create suffering in our lives.
In other words, meditation is not a relaxation technique, although there are some aspects of it that are relaxing. Nor is it meant to achieve blissful states of consciousness, although we may feel blissful at times. We are aiming for a highly concentrated and clear peace of mind that allows us to face any challenges in our life with equanimity and openness.
What are you unwilling to feel?
This lesson is wonderfully demonstrated in a story about a holy man. I first heard this story on Tara Brach’s podcasts and like to remind myself of its lesson, as it is a great mantra for our practice and our lives:
In a far-off land, word spread far and wide of a holy man with magic so powerful it could relieve the most severe suffering. After seekers of healing traveled through the wilderness to reach him, he’d swear them to secrecy about what was to pass between them next. Once they took the vow, the holy man asked a single question: “What are you unwilling to feel?”
This inquiry–What are you unwilling to feel?–is a beautiful one to ask about so many areas of our life. It is a wonderful mantra to bring into yoga asana practice, where we move the body into intense stretches and poses. Rather than shying away from the pain of a deep hamstring stretch, we can go directly into it.
We can also apply this same question to the intense emotions and mental patterns that can come up during a meditation session. If we are feeling pain in our hip, rather than shying away from it or wishing it would disappear, we can bring our attention to it.
And, when we do bring our attention to whatever we normally avoid, an extraordinary transformation happens. The pain begins to lose its hold on us. As we feel our back pain shift from painful pulsing to a radiating warmth to a heavy ball, we realize that everything is temporary, everything changes, and this too shall pass. When we really take the time to feel our emotions, we realize it only takes a few minutes for them to move throughout our body. We look at our thoughts and realize they are just thoughts. They come and they go, and we do not have to get so caught up in them.
Meditation then does not offer an end to our problems, but it does keep us from getting so caught up in them. Being present does not provide an end to challenging emotions. Instead, we find a freedom from complicating them.
This is the process of awakening, of noticing our patterns and breaking free of them. To an awakened being, the human experience is unconscious. We simply don’t realize how much of our life is spent running from pain and searching for pleasure, guided by urges of which we are barely cognizant. Underneath all this running around is the assumption that, if we eventually get enough of what we want and avoid enough of what we do not want, we will be happy.
But it never works. Our happiness is only ever known in relation to our sadness. We will never find peace stuck in the endless cycle of craving and aversion. Instead, we feel the entire human experience–the good and the bad, the pleasurable and the painful. We ask ourselves “what am I unwilling to feel?” and head right into the necessary work we must do. In this way, our pain turns to medicine and our constant searching turns into a resting peace.
I have written before about how the microcosm reflects the macrocosm. We can apply this same attitude to this moment. How we meet this moment is how we meet every moment. If we are to increase our capacity to be present, to be in the present moment, to “be here now” and discover the “power of now,” then we have to learn to be with discomfort.
I would go as far to say that your capacity to be with suffering is the same as your capacity to be present. Because when you just did an invigorating hike to the top of a mountain on a perfect sunny day, it is easy to be present. But when your body is in pain or you are with someone who is sick and suffering, that is the challenge. So the only thing getting in the way of you and this moment is exactly what you are unwilling to feel.
So we have to open our heart to all of it, the entire human experience. This life full of what the Buddhists call ten thousand joys and ten thousand sorrows. We have to learn to sit with it and be in it.
So the follow up question to, “what are you willing to feel?” may be, “can you keep your heart open, even in hell?” That is the true measure of our practice: how unconditional we have made our loving-presence to this moment.
