The problem with meditation

The challenge of slowing down in the mutating mazes of modern culture and society

photo by Xiao Dacunha

The difficulty with meditation is my entire life history. Not to mention my daily dose of chaos thanks to the ways of the world.

I fool myself if I think this is just so simple as concentrating on my breath. Rather, this idea shows me all the ways I fool myself. Yet the invitation is not to fight - with myself, with the world or any other fiction that my mind may contrive.

Nor is this task only mine when I sit quietly with closed eyes. It’s the same task all day long with eyes open, as I move in and out of relation with all the other worlds that live behind the eyes of each face that gazes in my direction or ignores and passes me by.

While I can never know how it goes inside those minds, I guess that the landscape is every bit as complex and vexing as mine. Peace of mind and resonance of the heart, harmoniously tuned to surrounding souls, is a holy grail that many seek, but too many never find. All this awaits when I ask my mind to rest, a not-so-simple request in an insomnious world where to love requires me to reinvent myself again and again.

The other day a woman asked me to help her recover her meditation practice which she felt was slipping away. So I invited her to sit still and close her eyes for one minute - and make sure not to meditate.

Afterwards she said, “I didn’t try to focus on my breath or stop my thoughts, I just allowed them to play.” By letting go of meditating, she relaxed a place in her being she hadn’t known she was holding.

Then I asked her to do it again.

This time she described a feeling that gradually descended, from her head down her spine and into the ground. She landed in the presence of a familiar flame that rose from the bottom of her belly up into her heart.

“That’s my flame,” she said, the same one she has known all her life, that first appeared when she was a girl learning to ride horses.

“My flame gives me courage.”

We reflected on whether it would be better to “succeed” at meditation - her stated goal - or simply allow herself to reconnect each day with her flame.

Through years of sitting with the stuff of my own life and the stuff of the lives of those who seek my support, I have concluded that there are two main challenges that frustrate those who seek, but don’t find, the solace of meditation.

The first is a haunting question - “Am I doing this right?” - which highlights every difference between my inner experience and the words I’ve heard spoken by any meditation teacher.

I simply wish to say that the answer is

“Yes! You are!
Despite any noise or discord you feel,
feeling what you feel
is what you are ‘supposed to’ feel!”

From this ground, every other teaching is valid, but not before. You must always begin by giving yourself full permission to not know what you do not know.

The other obstacle to thriving in meditation is bodily discomfort.

It is an unfortunate fact that modern technology and institutions have evolved as parasites on the human form. We are asked to conform our shapes to the insatiable demand for convenience, blocking the free flow of the energies that were always meant to dance through and between us.

So my client and I explored the way a head can sit on a spine, how to balance the body’s weight, find freedom in the belly and energy in the legs, how the breath expands when the hip joints know where to sit.

Such things I have learned to teach with my hands and my words, yet I do not insist. All I can really do is point in the right direction. Each one of us must feel through the dark of our own physicality to find our way home.

Before parting ways, we sat one last time in silence to see what we would feel.

I myself was mostly occupied by wondering about her experience. Yet the presence of her silence had a calming effect on me, deepening the darkness behind my eyes. After the bell rang, she reported that she had fallen into pure fascination with the subtlest shifts of her inner sensations and the differences she found, here and there, that she felt no temptation to correct. She observed how the infinite never stops changing.

Every traditional meditative lineage has jewels to offer us. Yet the holy grail of presence is never a technique, but the willingness to follow the movement of what is to the place where fascination spontaneously arises, an interlocking dance of being, attention and experience. This attuned and aligned aliveness is a seed that can grow sprouts in any direction, even passing through pain.

With time, flowers may blossom from all gradations of soil, not only when the body sits in silence, but also while bobbing and weaving through the mutating mazes of culture and society. Inner clarity makes space for a more luminous resonance that calls to the insides of other embodied beings who long to make music from noise and spread the signal wider and wider.

With practice, I can learn to give myself more and more permission to be no more or less than who I am, to feel nothing other than what I feel and to remain courageously curious despite the vastness of all that I do not know.

If I persist, I come to see that my expansion more readily sustains the more I can likewise give permission to every being I encounter to shape their essence as they see fit, regardless of my preferences.

In this pursuit of the free movement of all souls, I discover why and how to meditate.

Slowing down and letting go sounds simple enough.
In practice, this intention seeks expression
in an accelerating world of increasing mindlessness.

You’re invited to join a community practice
for letting go of efforts you didn’t know you were making
so that your inner flame burns bright again.

Click below to join an upcoming workshop on The 4 Postures of Love

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