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Paramhansa Yogananda said, “The soul loves to meditate!” The ego, however, because of its basic restlessness, finds it difficult to meditate. But we can learn to work with ourselves and make adjustments to help our practice. Once we realize the benefits of meditation, we relax more into its flow. Try to bring to your efforts in meditation common sense, patience, and self-compassion. Here are the most common obstacles to meditation, and what we can do to resolve them.
When we don’t feel like meditating, and we give in to this feeling, we can quickly go into a downward spiral. Yogananda said, “The less you meditate, the less you want to meditate. The more you meditate, the more you want to meditate.” When you don’t want to meditate, the best thing to do is a shorter meditation. Create the habit of meditation by doing it every day, even if it is only for 3 – 5 minutes! Remember that a short focused meditation is much more beneficial than a long, unfocused one.
Sitting still might seem easy, but it actually makes a tremendous demand on the body and mind. Most of the time our bodies are in motion, so much so that we hardly notice it. When we try to become still we can find it quite a challenge. So we should be easy on ourselves and accept the fact that it takes time to go from motion to stillness, from outwardness to inwardness. This is true on every level of our being. Every moment of our lives we are usually active, unless we are asleep, and even then there is a certain level or movement of body and mind. Meditation is being, not doing. Think of a lake, turbulent on the surface, but the depths are still and calm. To get to the depths you must dive through the restless surface. Allow time to get comfortable, to scratch and to wriggle, then gently and firmly insist on physical stillness.
Being physically comfortable is very important part of meditation practice. Exercise always helps. Stretching, or a few yoga postures before you begin to meditate will help greatly. Use pillows, pads, benches, a chair or whatever you need to support your upright posture. Find a position that your body can maintain comfortably and still have the spine upright.
When you’re short on time, cut down on the length of meditation, rather than skipping it altogether. Go for quality rather than quantity. Learn to manage your time a little more wisely. Remember that if you meditate your energy and concentration powers grow, and you will use all your time more efficiently.
This is a very insidious thought, because it may cause you to stop meditating completely. Plus, it isn’t true! You cannot measure your success as a meditator by judging a particular meditation, or even a series of meditations. Every meditation builds on the one before it, even if you think it wasn’t a good one. What is a good meditation anyway? One that you do! St. Teresa of Avila said, “A meditation is well done, if all you did was fight distraction.”
The purpose of meditation techniques is to bring the mind back from being distracted. We think we should never be distracted once we have a meditation technique. But remember that the point of using meditation practices is that now we do have something for the mind to return to. This is practicing meditation correctly — each time you realize that you are distracted, calmly return to your technique. No matter how many times this happens during a meditation, calmly return and never give in to discouragement.
© Ananda Church of Self-Realization 1995 – 2010
