3 Ways to Make Meditation Easier and More Sustainable

Also; WHY I Meditate

Hello. I’m Don Boivin and this is Shy Guy Meets the Buddha. Thanks for being here. If you like what you’re about to read, please consider a small token of appreciation; a tip or paid subscription would be very generous and so helpful. Thank you! 🙏 (“Buy Me a Coffee” is an online tipping platform where you can tip as little as $5 to your favorite hard-working writer 😊)

Why Meditate?

Despite the fact that I’m aware meditation is no magic carpet ride to higher planes of existence;

And despite my recent post in which I shared my realization that no one gets to escape the messiness and suffering of life as a human, no matter their spiritual practice (“On [Not] Transcending the Messiness”);

And despite knowing that meditation is not enough on its own to transform my life;

And despite my belief that we would be better off having never heard the word enlightenment (or heaven, for that matter);

And despite my admission that I don’t call myself a Buddhist (link to Note);

Despite all this and more, I still meditate every day.

Meditation offers a counterbalance to the fact that I have been far too busy for far too long trying to obtain something I don’t have or become something I’m not. Money, status, fulfillment, admiration, love, understanding, purpose, meaning.

This living as if self-improvement is the purpose, the reward, and the only objective worth pursuing, can become so deeply ingrained and habitual that one’s thinking unknowingly revolves around it almost every moment of every day. I wrote an essay called “Gimme, Gimme, Gimme, I Want Everything I See,” about how I finally woke up to the fact that I couldn’t even enjoy a Sunday ride in the car without looking at everything around me—the houses, the trees, the storefronts, the ocean—in terms of what comfort, enjoyment, or opportunity they could provide me; without turning everything I saw into a dream of a better life, a new business pursuit, or a different me.

When I meditate, I’m not trying to get anything. In fact, I’m doing the opposite; I’m taking a break from all that and simply living in the moment as it is, not as I want it to be.

How often are we solely present to the here and now, rather than with half a mind on what’s next? A half hour a day is the least I can do to exercise my “be-here-now” muscles.

I find meditation to be just the thing to create some balance in my life. In fact, these days the scales are starting to tip in such a way that I’m finding myself more often in a state of meditation (not desiring anything) even when I’m not sitting quietly on a cushion with my legs crossed. And that’s a great sign. I could probably give up the nightly sitting altogether and be okay, but I don’t think I will, because the intention and discipline behind it, I’ve found, are a healthy practice and confidence-builder that I continue to apply to other areas of my life.

Making Meditation more Sustainable

If you’ve tried meditation and found it to be an effort you can’t seem to sustain, know that there is a way to build a habit that doesn’t require [much] discipline and can end up feeling like the best part of your day.

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned about formal meditation—and I learned this gradually, not in one aha! moment, is that there is definitely such a thing as trying too hard, both physically and mentally. I apply this lesson in several ways.

One

The first is by relaxing my muscles. Very soon after sitting down in a meditation position that works for me (on a Zafu cushion, with back straight and legs crossed in one of the more relaxed half- or quarter-lotus positions), I notice that most of my muscles are tense. With that awareness of the state of my body (and mind you, this awareness is already a sign that my meditation is working), I’ll relax my back just a little—still holding it straight, but not quite as rigid—as well as my leg muscles, and my shoulders. The surrounding muscles usually follow suit, although applying a more methodical, step-by-step method of focusing on each individual area of the body in turn—say, from head slowly down to toes (sometimes called a “body scan”) is also an option. In addition, I do find I must continually remind myself to ease up on the muscles around my eyes, exerting only enough effort to keep my eyelids gently closed.

When I relax my muscles, I immediately feel this sense of relief spreading through me. It’s a feeling of hope rather than of resistance, resolve, or dread. Expressed in words, the feeling might be, Oh, how nice; if meditation feels like this, I can probably do it as long as I want!

Two

Then there are all the thoughts racing around in my mind, the memories, judgements, plans, and mental side trips that always seem to reveal themselves when one decides to sit quietly and calmly. I’ve learned what to do about this “monkey mind” activity, and my method is not exactly the one I learned in books.

A lot of mindfulness teachers note that thoughts “arise, abide for a while, and then fall away,” which is true; that is what thoughts do. But then there are the hosts of techniques offered for “removing” or “dealing” with “unwanted” thoughts. One example is observing the thought arising (as if you can observe a thought; when the mind is thinking, the thought is the mind), then labeling the thought “thinking,” which is somehow supposed to help the thought to fall away naturally.

I think the problem with this approach isn’t that it doesn’t work, but rather, the implication that thoughts are bad, or an obstacle to meditation. And you’re... what? Trying to trick them into going away? This aversion to thinking, and the consequential judgement of the self as inept because one can’t stop thinking, is obviously a spiraling trap that only serves to turn one off to the practice.

We must rid ourselves of the belief that we can and must stop thinking in order to be good meditators.

You may ask, But if you end up spending the whole meditation lost in thought, you may as well just be taking a walk or reading a book or listening to music, right?

Well, no, not really; I’d still stick with the meditation because the commitment and discipline slowly build into a beneficial practice, whether I’m enjoying a steady and calming experience or slogging through a distracted and “unproductive” one.

I don’t think of thoughts as bad or as an obstacle or distraction. Thoughts are the natural activity of the mind. Thoughts are mind. If I’m meditating, and I suddenly realize that for five or ten or even twenty minutes I’ve been lost in thoughts of the past or the future, thoughts about my job, or my relationship, or that cool thing I want to buy online, I just laugh at myself. I use the activity of my mind as a chance to understand myself better. Ah! I think, There’s the mind, doing what it does; it always wants to dream and review the past and figure things out. Isn’t it interesting that I want to control it and yet I can’t (and then this might lead to the sudden realization that trying to control your own thinking is like, to paraphrase Allen Watts, trying to look at your own eyeballs, or a snake trying to consume itself. How can you divide yourself into two selves; one that thinks and another that is somehow going to control that thinking? And this kind of thought could be called an insight, which is one of the goals of Vipassana, or Insight Meditation.

How can you call such a meditation, thought-infused though it may be, a failure?

Three

A third way to relax, and perhaps most important—certainly the one I think I use the most—is to use feelings as meditation focal points instead of resisting them and feeling bad about them.

You can’t decide how you’re going to feel, so adding resistance and judgement to an already existing feeling, like anger, fear, or anxiety, is what Buddhists call the double arrow, adding one wound on top of another.

Restlessness is a common feeling. It’s one that I get to work with in almost every meditation session. Usually after about twenty minutes of sitting, I find myself glancing at the clock. I don’t use any sort of timer or alarm, because I prefer to keep things natural. I like to believe that I’m not adding goals to my meditation; that I’m simply going to meditate as long as I want, rather than adhering to some self-imposed time limit. But in truth, I do actually intend my session to last at least thirty minutes. After five years of steady practice, I find thirty to forty minutes of meditation to work well for me. In fact, it is often those last ten minutes that feel the calmest and most enriching.

But just the same, after twenty minutes, here comes that itch, that urge to change my position, my environment, something. I open my eyes and check the clock. Oh, I think, still ten minutes to go.

Here is my signal to pay attention to my body and its workings. Here is an opportunity to grow more intimate with a feeling—in this case, restlessness. What exactly is restlessness? I’ll ask myself. Where is it located in my body? What does it feel like? If I don’t give in to it by quitting my meditation session, what happens then? I’ll mentally scan my body and mind, looking for the source or heart of the feeling.

Truth is, though, that by this time, the feeling has passed, and I find myself deeper in meditation, in the now, than before (which is why I say the last ten minutes are often the most enriching). The restlessness is forgotten and I’m relaxed once again.

In Summary

So, to sum up my three methods or techniques for making meditation a more enjoyable, satisfying, and therefore sustainable, experience:

1. Relax your muscles.

2. Stop judging and resisting those ever-arising thoughts. Find the humor in the “monkey mind.”

3. Use feelings as a chance to get to know yourself better and deepen your meditation.

And the best part of these three golden acts of awareness is, they are exactly what you want to take away from your formal sitting meditation and gradually turn into everyday mindfulness habits.

DB

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If you have any questions about meditation, please feel free to ask. There are no rules, of course, but I’ll be happy to share more details on what works for me.

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Always a pleasure!