Inside Yoga 50 (5/3/2012)

Meditation can really feel like hard work, yet we are told that it is relaxing and liberating. It is true that there are many positive feelings we can feel through meditating, but the truth is that most benefits come through some sort of labour and hard work.

Meditation is no different. We are dealing with a potent and powerful force that is our mind when we attempt and practice meditation. It is sometimes described as a raging elephant that we attempt to bring under our control with a small stick, or perhaps another description is that of a misbehaving child who persists in doing something we want to stop, yet no amount of shouting and ticking off work. What does work is a more subtle approach akin to not giving the child attention or space to misbehave, the sort of attention the child feeds off and only gets more badly behaved. Ignore the child and it will leave you alone – and apply this to our mind and see what happens.

Our mind can be like this, in the sense that if we indulge it and let it tell us all manner of bad thoughts and distracting thoughts we will be lulled into its game and we can end up being stuck there. We can ignore the mind while meditating thereby starving it of the “oxygen” it needs to survive.

Yet it’s a stubborn one and will try all sorts of methods to take us away from meditation. It might plague us with “very important thoughts”, which if we look into them discover they are not important and can be dropped in favour of meditation.

That is why meditation can feel such hard work. We can spend a lot of our time when meditating fighting off the mind’s attempts to distract us, but the good news is that even if we feel it’s been hard work, we can often come out of the meditation period feeling more free and better with ourselves. This is because, although we might feel like we have not reached our goal of meditational awareness, the journey there can be rewarding and liberating – although we might not have reached our destination, we have removed several layers en route; layers which distract and block our path to meditation bliss.

And the even better news is that after some time of practising the meditation sessions can feel less of a battle, and more like a serene place to enter and settle into. To put it another way, we have removed obstacles and gradually through practice and time, we find less obstacles on our path each time we set out again.

With perseverance and patience and lots of practice, meditation becomes a program we can switch on at will whenever we decide to meditate.

There are many techniques used to achieve this in meditation, and one I used last week can be useful. When we meditate we can remind ourselves that there is “nothing to do and nowhere to go”. It can be repeated like a mantra or come to periodically when we are distracted.

So often in our lives we feel the pressure to do something or go somewhere, and when we are meditating we are in the ideal position to tell ourselves that: “There is nothing to do and nowhere to go.”

Try it out yourselves. Sit quietly and repeat to yourself: “There is nothing to do and nowhere to go.”

It’s a simple message but an effective one, and it’s also a good idea to give ourselves the permission to do nothing and go nowhere. We can so often feel guilty unless we are busy. There is a time and a place for everything and this includes having a moment or two to be quiet and say to ourselves: “There is nothing to do and nowhere to go.”