COMMON OBSTACLES TO PRACTICE

The most common obstacle to formal meditation practice is not wanting to. Some part of you may think it is a good idea, but when the impulse to sit (or practice formally in some other way, say with the body scan or some mindful yoga) comes to you as a passing thought or feeling, other thoughts and feelings immediately crowd in, saying things like “Not now” or “Who has time?” or “I’d rather read or get in touch with so and so” or “It’s time to eat soon,” or “I have too much work right now” or “I’ll do it later” or “I’ll start tomorrow” or “I’ll just be mindful doing what I’m doing.” The mind is always generating thoughts that can divert or deflect that initial impulse to stop, and dwell for a time in the timeless, in stillness.

This is where intentionality and motivation come into the picture. After all, meditation is a discipline, and we benefit from it as a discipline when we metaphorically and literally take our seat whether we feel like it or not, no matter what other currents within the mind are offering up to deflect us from our primary purpose. So if you desire to cultivate and refine mindfulness in your life through formal practice, especially if it is new to you and you have not developed the discipline of a regular practice, or if the discipline of practice has dissipated for you over the years or become stale or denatured, you may be reassured to know that it is relatively easy to establish that core discipline or reestablish it. One powerful way is by committing yourself to waking up earlier than you normally would and making a sacrosanct time for yourself before any of the other doings and commitments of the day take over and swamp your intention. Imagine a time that is entirely for you, not to fill up or to do anything with, but simply to inhabit, to be in your own good company, to rest in as you become intimate with the unfolding of life and of life expressing itself moment by moment in your own body, and in your own mind and heart.

Of course, obstacles to meditation practice don’t limit themselves to just making it hard for you to get started. Once on the cushion (this way of speaking is meant to include all the formal meditation practices we have been exploring and cultivating), there are so many ways that you can still be deflected from your intention to be present with the unfolding of whatever is arising.

First of all, the body can be squirmish, fidgety, seemingly inconsolably uncomfortable, plagued by tingling sensations, itches, or strong impulses to move and wiggle. This is no problem at all. These are just passing states and stages the body gets into and goes through. With some practice, when seen and recognized as mere sensation, those impulses and the sensations behind them can be held lightly and gently in awareness like any other impulses and sensations in the body, especially when they are not fed by inflamed thinking in the mind that is continually judging them, fighting with them, wanting to change them or surrender to them, or saying things to yourself such as: “You knew you weren’t cut out to meditate,” or “This confirms that meditation is sheer torture, a masochistic enterprise for those who don’t already have enough suffering in their lives.” This is, of course, sheer nonsense, all simply reactive mental noise on top of reactive body “noise.”

As soon as you settle into the stillness underneath these surface waves of the mind and you become familiar with the topology of the inner and outer landscapes of your whole being, with the bodyscape, the mindscape, the nowscape, the airscape, the sensescapes, these obstacles to practice tend to settle down and for the most part, abate. After a while, when they do make an appearance from time to time, they are just seen and known as various mind states and body states, as “weather patterns” coming and going in the field of awareness. There are always compelling reasons and ample excuses for not giving yourself over to being present right now. But as we rest in awareness anyway, even for a few moments, and allow ourselves to be the knowing, we soon see that just as with all other phenomena in the realm of experience, they do not endure.

That said, in the early stages of developing a mindfulness practice, if the resistance is particular strong, one suggestion is that you start with some mindful yoga first, and gradually ease yourself into stillness, either sitting or lying down or standing. I love doing yoga before sitting, or before a body scan or some other lying down practice.

When dropping in for any extended period of time, we readily see that the mind can get just as squirmy as the body, if not more so. You might easily run into impatience, agitation, impatience, agitation, impatience, agitation. You get the picture. These too are not a problem. They are merely habits of mind, along with the five so-called classical “hindrances” in the Buddha’s teaching, which are indeed universal aspects of an untrained mind: sensual desire or greed; ill will or aversion; sloth and torpor—truly wonderful adjectives; restlessness, worry, and remorse; and doubt. As we watch them arise, linger, and pass away, along with the breath and whatever else we have chosen to include in the scope of our awareness, they too tend to be seen and known for what they are, merely impersonal mind states, and dissolve—that is, unless you feed them by struggling with them and wanting them to go away. They can serve as important, in fact, extremely useful objects of attention in their own right. You might even try making friends with your impatience, your agitations. The familiarization, the intimacy that develops from doing so is the meditation practice and leads to equanimity without having to dispel any of it. Pure awareness is beyond and independent of conditions and conditioning, and therefore free. What is more, it is always here, and always available, if you remember.

Sleepiness can also feel like an impediment to practice, as we have seen with the lying down meditations. But if you are serious about meditation, sleepiness does not present much of a problem. If you are totally sleep-deprived, you might try getting more sleep before you try to build or strengthen your meditation practice. The sleep-deprived mind tends to get a little crazy and lose perspective. This is best remedied by sleep. But if it is a matter of just congenitally falling asleep whenever you sit down to practice, then anything you do to support your practice makes sense, from throwing cold water on your face and neck before you come to the cushion, to taking a cold shower, or sitting with your eyes open, or standing, or all of the above. If you really want to wake up in your life and to your life, you will find good ways to support that intention and make it happen. If I am drowsy when I am driving late at night, and nothing else, such as loud rock and roll on the radio or fresh air is doing the trick, and simply stopping doesn’t seem to be the thing to do at that particular moment, I will slap myself hard across the face, and more than once if necessary. In that context, it may actually be an act of wisdom and compassion. With meditation, as I’ve said before, it comes down to whether or not you are willing to practice as if your life depended on it. Because it does.

Another common obstacle to authentic practice is idealizing your practice, setting impossible standards or goals for yourself and then making your practice into an act of will, almost an act of aggression, with little or no self-compassion and no sense of humor either. Most important is to not take ourselves too seriously. Remember that mindfulness practice is a radical act of love. That means that compassion and self-compassion lie at its root. If we cannot be gentle with and accepting of ourselves and the experiences we are having now, whatever they are, if we are always wanting some other, better experience to convince ourselves or others that we are “making progress,” that we are becoming a “better person,” then we probably should give up meditating. We will certainly be creating a great deal of stress and pain for ourselves, and then perhaps blaming the meditation practice for “not working” when it might be more accurate to say that we were unwilling to work with things as they are, as we found them, and accept ourselves as we are. Remember that the real curriculum is whatever arises moment by moment, and the challenge is how you will be in wise relationship to it. Remember that there is no improving on you, because you are already whole, already complete, already perfect as you are, including all the “imperfections.” While striving and even forcing can sometimes give the impression of “progress” and “movement” and of “getting somewhere in one’s practice,” without self-acceptance and self-compassion, the energy of contraction and forcing is an unwise and unskillful motivation for exploring stillness. Even with the development of significant focus and stability and clarity of mind, wisdom can be elusive because it is not something that we acquire, but a way of seeing and a way of being that grows within us when the conditions are right. The soil of deep practice requires the fertilizer of deep self-acceptance and self-compassion. For this reason, gentleness is not a luxury, but a critical requirement for coming to our senses. Rigor and discipline are fine, even necessary, but harshness and striving ultimately only engender unawareness and insensitivity, and further fragmentation just when we have an opportunity to recognize that we are already OK, already whole, right in this moment.

In the end, obstacles to practice are infinite. Yet all of them, anticipated and unanticipated, turn into allies when they are embraced in awareness. They can feed our commitment to practice rather than impede it if we recognize them for what they are and allow them to simply be part of the nowscape—not good, not bad—because wonder of wonders, they already are.

When your eyes are tired

the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone

no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark

where the night has eyes

to recognize its own.

There you can be sure

you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your womb

tonight.

The night will give you a horizon

further than you can see.

You must learn one thing.

The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds

except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet

confinement of your aloneness

to learn

anything or anyone

that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

DAVID WHYTE, “Sweet Darkness”