“We are kept from our goal not by obstacles but by a clear path to a lesser goal.”

Robert Brault

We see the advice everywhere. 

Health maintenance organization brochures feature short articles on meditation for better mental health.  We are shown pictures of healthy looking people sitting in a lotus position with peaceful facial expressions and eyes closed, an ever slight smile on their lips as they bask in magical meditation pleasure underneath rays of sunlight, cast down upon them in an idyllic nature setting in perfect weather.

I am glad meditation is being suggested more and more.  If it plants a seed of interest, that is great.  But this kind of imagery, while well-intentioned, can give the wrong impression of meditation.

It might be analogous to showing pictures of people doing some sort of physical exercise like running or lifting weights without any sweat on their brows and a big smile on their face, looking like they’re having the time of their lives as they accrue positive health benefits for their bodies.

It’s easier to understand how that’s a somewhat unrealistic image.  The people who are in really good shape from physical exercise should perhaps instead have their faces contorted in discomfort, sweat dripping down their faces and bodies, sometimes grunting, wheezing, coughing, and/or panting, with pained expressions on their faces from lactic acid in their muscles.  Sure, not everyone works out that intensely, but getting in great physical shape does entail pushing out of our comfort zone in order to later feel pleasurable aftereffects and improve our physical health.  How fast people go outside their comfort zone varies, but there’s no bypassing some amount of discomfort to have a benefit.

Meditation is very similar in this way.  Of meditation, people often say they “tried that,” and “it didn’t work.” What they usually mean by “work” is that it didn’t make them feel good, perhaps even making them feel worse in the short term.  

But that is like someone trying running for the first time and saying it didn’t work because it didn’t feel good.  Of course it didn’t.  And I don’t think that meditation is really supposed to feel good all the time, especially at first.

It’s not that it is supposed to always feel bad either.  But like physical exercise, it often is unpleasant, in a relieving sort of way.  That relief takes some time, usually, to recognize.  It is the relief of non-resistance, of surrender.  It is a surrender to the discomfort and emotional residue we’ve been suppressing and accumulating for a long time.  

Like with house cleaning, we may get more in touch with how dirty things are as we overturn couch cushions and look behind furniture to discover layers of soot and dust bunnies attached to old semi-sticky mystery pieces of food.  The feeling of cleanliness and sanitation comes later.  A purification process of any kind feels worse before it feels better.  And meditation is an emotional and energetic cleansing process.

There are people who take to meditation quickly, just as there people who take to running quickly. But I think they’re probably the exception.  

Sometimes meditation does feel good, like running feels good sometimes. But usually exercise feels good once someone has progressed.  It tends to be the case that exercise feels better and better the more we do it, and every exercise session is usually a mixture of both pleasant and unpleasant sensations, with the proportion of pleasant to unpleasant ones tending increase with practice.  People starting a new physical fitness routine will often say that the first few weeks is the hardest for developing the habit, because that’s when most of the pain, and the least amount of pleasure, is felt.  

I think that’s similarly why a lot of people don’t stick to a meditation practice.  They don’t realize that it’s supposed to be kind of slog for a while, and that in almost every meditation session you have there will be some proportion of sucky minutes to it. 

When you go on a run, there might be flat sections that feel pretty good, and uphill sections that make you suck wind, or downhill section that puts some discomfort on the knees.  Similarly, in a typical meditation session there will typically be parts of it that feel more spacious and peaceful, and other parts that feel hectic, stressful, anxious, scattered, chaotic, angry, sad, or sorrowful.

When is meditation working?

If meditation “working” doesn’t mean it feels pleasurable, then what is a sign that meditation is working?

Both physical exercise and meditation increase our level of freedom. If you’re used to running for 5 miles, then you have a greater capacity for walking with ease. If you regularly do squats and resistance lifts, then yardwork or picking up heavy items from the garage is going to feel a lot easier.  Just walking around during the day in a body that’s better tuned cardiovascularly and aerobically is going to feel a lot nicer.

By the same token, life is going to feel nicer emotionally if you practice opening yourself up to upsetting emotions that will arise when you sit still, shut out the noise, close your eyes, and stop taking in distracting inputs through the five senses.  It’s going to be a lot easier to navigate and manage emotionally stressful situations that bring up anxiety, hurt, anger, and sadness, if you’ve been putting yourself through regular emotional workouts through meditation practice in which you are consistently surrendering to feelings by keeping your heart open to them.

My advice about starting a meditation practice is to go into it with realistic motivations and expectations. It’s not about escaping your pain, it’s diametrically opposite of that. It’s about sitting still, so that your pain can arise and you can practice becoming emotionally resilient and strong. But that’s going to require suffering just like starting a new physical exercise program will entail suffering. If you’re feeling difficult emotions during meditation, that means you’re probably doing it right.

And it may be that with practice meditation starts feeling good, just like experienced runners get runners highs from endorphins eventually.  But good endorphin feels are a byproduct of running rather than the goal.  The goal is to have a healthy, resilient and capable body.  And the goal of meditation is to have a healthy, resilient, and capable emotional heart.

Checking out

There is another reason that meditation might not feel good at first, and it’s not the good reason.  It’s common to subtly dissociate during meditation.  Essentially the mind protects us from difficult feelings by wandering off into thought.  Some amount of this is normal, but if it’s happening for the entire meditation session, it might nullify most of the usefulness of the meditation.  An analogy might be going to the gym and doing just a few sets during an entire hour, and the rest of the time sitting on a bench while scrolling through social media on our phone.  And then we might leave the gym thinking, “this isn’t working” and we’d be right in this case.  That’s because we are not really doing the work.  

Eventually, someone like that, if they keep going to the gym, will probably start getting more and more sets in during that hour, leading to a more and more productive workout.  In meditation, I think this can happen as well if people stick to it.  And that is probably the way many get started.  That said, it might help to just be aware that this is a trap.  If you meditate for 20 or 30 minutes and feel like nothing is happening, you can ask yourself how much of that time was spent metaphorically scrolling the smartphone of the mind.  The goal is to redirect our focus to something in the present, such as the breath or sounds, or, preferably in my opinion, what your body is experiencing.  If you find that it’s just too difficult to stay present on any of these “objects of awareness” when you’re starting out, then I would suggest experimenting with doing the meditation in combination with some other activity that doesn’t take a whole lot of concentration, such as slow walking in nature, art, doodling, knitting, listening to some instrumental music, yoga, or other kinds of physical exercise. Make the primary goal to keep your heart open to whatever feelings and sensations arise, with a secondary grounding activity to keep you from getting too lost in thought.

If you have any meditation tricks that work for you, I’d love to hear them in the comment section.