Why is your meditation not progressing, or why can you not do it? We must look at it objectively and be willing to overcome all the stumbling blocks by determining, applying, and using willpower. If you want to overcome the deterrents and earnestly progress in your meditation, please read ahead to learn the reasons and be determined to iron out all that impedes your progress.
Before identifying the reasons and the remedies, let us have a few words about meditation. Meditation has very many benefits, and there are different types of meditation. Meditation has become more of a fad word nowadays, and generally, most people talk about peace of mind and feel-good effects. Meditators should be clear about the objective behind meditation and undertake a particular meditation depending on the clear-cut objective. Without delving into various types of meditation (not the topic of discussion here), let us understand the main reasons behind failure to undertake successful meditation: point, void, object-centred, blank or whatever ways of overcoming the same.
Do you occasionally meditate? Every other day or whenever you find the time? Whatever the case, you feel it is not going well or not satisfying as expected. Such a feeling is quite familiar to most who start meditation, and the reasons are very common and trivial that prevent one from progressing deeper into one’s meditation.
How often do you sit for meditation? Meditation must be done daily or every day to reap its benefits or have a meaningful impact on your life. Doubtless, there are some physical benefits to sitting for meditation without being aware of them. However, mental and emotional benefits or change happen only with consistent practice.
1. Regularity or consistency:
So, regularity or consistency is the prime necessity when undertaking meditational practice. Your posture or duration of time has no meaning as of now. You can sit in any comfortable position, but sit straight. Ten minutes every day regularly is always better than 30 minutes to one hour three times a week. Our mind runs in multiple directions in the wakeful state during the day, and in that process, we get conditioned to specific thoughts and emotions, and these patterns get reinforced. It is all the more necessary, therefore, to strengthen our meditation skills every day. Just as our mind works every day, so should our meditation work every day. Now, the question is, what is the best way to create the habit? The easiest way to cultivate this habit is by meditating first thing in the morning. Start with five or ten to fifteen minutes, but be determined not to miss even a day.
Maybe you have an early schedule the next day; then, you must make adjustments and wake up a few minutes earlier and sit for meditation. Perhaps you need to travel or share a room. If so, meditate on the bed, in the car or any vehicle you travel, or anywhere you get solitude and privacy. You may question whether “I am doing it correctly or am I sitting in the right posture”? Forget about all those self- enquiries and do it anyway. Know about it and correct it later. Develop the attitude that whatever the circumstance, external or internal, never allow it to mess with your commitment to meditate daily. Never let anything, I mean anything, interfere with your meditation schedule.
(Note: If it is a higher level Nijanand meditation, you should be in a sublime love state and make it the first and foremost priority of the day. Whatever may it be, everything else can get second, third, fourth or fifth priority).
2. No fast-food type expectation:
You may have started your meditation with some expectations. But don’t expect too much too soon. Patience is the keyword. So, once you have begun, let go of all expectations and do it as a habit, like all the routines of our life (bathing, eating, sleeping, etc.) and do it for the sake of doing it. Gradually, your mindset will shift or change, and you will start enjoying it. Start enjoying the practice itself. Enjoy every aspect of it, like how you feel after you have sat – how you become calmer, how clarity of mind manifests, how you get more centred, etc. Meditation might not make you feel like that all the time, but as you practice it longer, you will realise it makes you feel good. Remember that the benefits of many more profound meditational practices will accrue only after months or years of daily routine. So, in the beginning, keeping expectations lighter is a must; you must be prepared for the long haul.
3. Any preparation before I start?
No preparation is required before you start. You can sit in a comfortable posture but keep the spine straight. You can sit at any time of the day, to begin with. However, regular sitting first thing in the morning and before bed is best if you start this routine immediately. However, additional sittings at another time are welcome and would add to your meditational success. (Instead of idle talk and gossip, using that time in moments of inward meditational silence would help you and your life in many ways.) Remember that your sessions can go more in-depth and better if you relax your body for a couple of minutes, calm your breath, and affirm your intention in your mind. Maybe you can do a few simple stretches or take three deep breaths and affirm your intention, “OK, I will focus now”.
4. Any particular meditation?
Many jump from technique to technique. Doing a different guided meditation daily is OK in the first few months of your meditational practice. There are many other meditations in vogue nowadays. However, you would want to choose a particular technique and stick to it after some time. Different people do, indeed, work better with other methods. So, it’s essential to experiment with different approaches to find what works best for you. Many people do meditation for ‘as they say’ to get peace or develop the power of concentration. For this, any of the mindful concentration techniques would do. However, suppose you are looking for spiritual satisfaction or progress. In that case, you must be clear about the objective and undertake either Patanjali yog, vitrag yog, vipashyana yog or the ultimate nijanand yog. With regular practice, your mind would become more intimate with it. Once you start developing that intimacy, focusing on that object in future sessions will be easier.
5. You keep doubting whether you are doing it correctly:
As you practice and want to improve, you may stay overanalysing. Such analysis is a common hindrance with many people, a mistake that can take one to very subtle levels of practice, so you should become alert and not engage in this form of mental exercise. There are two consequences of this mental enquiry. (i) The mind remains engaged during the practice and keeps analysing your mental states rather than being in the meditation process. (ii) It often de-motivates you when you remain uncertain whether you are doing it correctly. Such a state of uncertainty or your inability to figure it out would make you give up. So, it would help if you let go of this self-questioning and continue practising.
As you keep practising, you will slowly gain clarity about meditation and the process per se you are indulging in. It is not something to be understood and described. See it as an experience which will hold you in good stead. Let a constant hunger keep you from experiencing meditation. As in any endeavour, you must keep learning and experimenting with your techniques and approaches. If you are in touch with any spiritual master who is a meditation practitioner, ask and learn from him. Any new information or learning you can get would always be a bonus. You have to keep at it and endeavour to keep moving forward. Along this journey of moving forward, your uncertainties and doubts will gradually disappear, and you will remain rooted in the experience.
To begin with, how you will start your meditation requires you to identify an object of meditation. Concentrating on that object for as long as possible would be best.
Since this is a general introductory article for beginning meditation, I do not want to bother you with any particular object. However, in another article on various meditations on vogue and their objects of concentration, you can make a deliberate choice depending on the ultimate purpose.
Once you have identified the object, you need to concentrate on that object. It goes without saying that as a beginner, the moment you start meditating, various thoughts and distractions will bog you down. The secret is not to let go of meditation under frustration. Without getting frustrated, allow the thoughts to flow and keep viewing them as a viewer without offering resistance. Slowly brush aside the thoughts/distractions and concentrate on the object of your meditation. Sure enough, again, the thoughts/distractions would come. Allow them to come without resistance, and view them as neutral. Again, divert your attention back to your object of meditation. Keep doing this, day after day or even months after months.
Soon, without you realising it, your mind wandering disappears, and you will increasingly and intently gain concentration on the object of meditation. The saying is practice makes a man perfect, and so is the case in meditation.
6. Lack of intent and attention:
A significant drawback is that your intent and awareness are not what they should be. If you go to a physical training centre and sloppily perform exercises, you can’t complain that you did not benefit. The same goes for meditation. It would help if you had some intensity of effort and resolve. Buddhism has a beautiful metaphor: You must think everything depends on your practice. So, practice as if your tail is on fire, so to speak. When your tail is on fire, you run around desperately to extinguish the fire. That desperation should be brought into your meditation practice as if your life depended on it. In fact, quite a few of your higher achievements depend on undertaking successful meditation. That is your sure spiritual path to emancipation, enlightenment and salvation. Practice your meditation not as a routine to be done away with but with dedication, commitment and a sense of reverence, love and addiction. At the end of your meditation session, sit quietly for a few minutes contemplating the meditation that you did and slowly come out of your meditation and to your other routines of life. This exercise would help you carry the meditation experience for the rest of your day.
7. Getting distracted?
Don’t get put off or beat yourself up when you get distracted. As said earlier, keep practising; there is no need to criticise yourself for how often you get distracted during meditation. It is pretty normal and very much a part of the game. Don’t curse yourself about the distractions during your meditation, and don’t think all others meditating are not suffering from this disruptive action of Maya (the illusory entity). In fact, almost all people have taken months or even years before they enjoy peaceful meditation without any distractions. So, avoid self-castigating yourself, which would only make you move away from meditation. Enjoy those distractions as much as your meditation, and slowly brush aside those distractions. Concentrating on those distractions itself is a sort of mindful meditation.
- See another blog for different types of meditation, worldly and spiritual.
8. The mind remains busy during the day, and negative thoughts are reinforced.
Your mind remains too busy during the day. Is it not also a reason why one needs to do meditation? Yes. It would be best to meditate, among other reasons, because your mind is too restless. It’s not under your control. It goes off in all wrong directions and takes you to unrewarding, wasteful thoughts. Especially if you are the kind of person harbouring all sorts of negative thoughts and self-blaming type for all the ills of the world, remember that you are conditioning your mind to reinforce negative thoughts. Such conditioning makes you develop an inferiority complex and underestimate your worth. You end up being less productive and uncontended.
Just as your meditation quality influences your mind during the day, the way you keep your mind also influences your reflection. Remember that if your mind remains occupied and overpowered with restlessness, a few minutes of deep meditation will not be able to override your distressed mental state. Let us look at it differently: how effective would 30 minutes at the gym be if you drank soda and ate loads of junk food for the rest of the day? The same goes for meditation. If you are continually drinking the soda of restlessness and eating the junk food of destructive thoughts and addictive emotions – your meditation will only partially clean up the damage. Remember that the deeper you go into meditation in meditational practice, the more you enjoy the peace of a centred mind. Please be disinclined to waste time in utterly useless thoughts and meaningless activities! Likewise, the more your life and mind become organised – by having clarity on what you are doing – the easier it will become to concentrate better in your sessions. The above suggestion draws your attention to the fact that meditation is essential but not enough. It gives you tools to have more clarity in your inner world. But you will still need to use this space and self-awareness to make better choices. Meditation is essential, but not enough. It would help if you were mindful of what thoughts occupy you most. So, develop the habit of observing your mind and seeing what’s happening inside you. Such an exercise will significantly help your meditation, and your meditation will make this process easier. It’s a self-reinforcing positive loop.
9. Your activities and actions:
In your day-to-day life, how much time do you spend on electronic media and mobile? You probably spend too much time on various media or even a single medium. Much of our restlessness is created or reinforced by the electronic media we remain engrossed in. Movies, news, social media, articles, forums, games, TV, etc. Such involvement is a challenge the meditators of olden times did not have to face. All the more reason why we need meditation more than ever! When we expose our brains to a lot of information, it is only natural that all these images and ideas will show up when we sit, triggering distracting emotions and further rumination. Such distractions are especially so because most of the media we remain exposed to put us in a craving state, restlessness, anger or fear.
Therefore, if you want a more profound transformation in your mental and emotional states, it’s a great help if:
(i) Limit the types of media you indulge in and the time you spend on your cell phone. Ask yourself, ‘How do I watch/ read/listen to make me feel? What types of programs do they install in your brain?
(2) Limit the amount of electronic media in which you indulge. You may try setting the rules for no screens after 10 pm or before breakfast. Or limit your time checking your email and chatting on mobile and Facebook to three times daily.
(3) Go on “media fasts”. Try one weekend per month or one day each week. These habit changes will positively influence meditation and make you less stressed and more productive. You will be more into the now, as it happens. On a final note: Don’t feel overwhelmed If you are caught in more than one of these “mistakes”. Work on them one at a time. Start with the ones that are easier to change, or that would have the most significant impact. Meditation is a lifetime practice and not something you master in a few months. Re-conditioning your mind takes time, so consistent efforts are needed. Even if some of these obstacles are present in your practice, you will still benefit from sitting. But, if you want to improve your meditation, reap more benefits, and go deeper into what it can do for you, practice all that is said here to optimise your practice. Trust me, and you will not regret it. Master your mind for effective strategies for building a meditation habit and integrating it into your routine. It’s not enough that meditation is becoming popular. We also need to raise awareness about how to meditate more effectively.
Meditation is a beautiful practice that improves your well-being, sharpens your mind, and opens many doors. It allows you to master your mind and thus master your life. Meditation can help you transform yourself. It is a powerful path for overcoming anxiety, stress, and mental noise. It empowers you to be calm, centred and focused. But for that to happen, we need to concentrate on three main aspects of Meditation:
1. Practice regularly without fail, giving primary importance to it first thing in the morning and last before bed.
2. Sit firmly even if disturbances occur or your mind wanders. Allow them to come without resisting, slowly ease them out, and again concentrate.
3. Be patient and don’t expect fast results. Keep at it patiently, and you shall meet with success. Hold on to these three cardinal aspects. Dedication, time, effort, self-discipline and patience are the essential requirements. But it doesn’t need to be that hard. You don’t need to do this all on your own. You can sit and practice with someone you are comfortable with. Together, they would give confidence, enforce enjoyable dedication, and serve as motivation for both.
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