To Succeed, Learn to Fail
Most people, when they decide to try meditation, assume it’ll be easy. And the books and spruikers and ads for meditation and mindfulness classes certainly make meditation seem easy.
After all, how hard can it be to sit down, zone out and be peaceful?
So people sign up or buy the book or the app and begin meditating – and at first, meditation does indeed seem easy. As mind and body revel in the novelty of doing something new, in the beginning, it’s normal to experience a period of elation.
But then the ‘problems’ begin.
Over the following days or weeks, the serenity and calm they wanted from meditation apparently disappears, and people think they’re failing, for any number of reasons:
• They get bored.
• Their mind arcs up with storms of thinking.
• Their attention just won’t stay still.
• Their body aches in ways they never imagined, and so on.
At that point, most people assume they’re doing something wrong, because ‘meditation isn’t working anymore’. They think maybe they’re not suited to meditating, so they give up and go off to find the next new thing.
But meditation is like any skill. Failure is an essential part of it – as it is with any sport or learned ability. Failure is simply another step on the path – a bit like kids learning to ride a bike. Each time they fall off, they get back on and start again. They learn to ride by failing. As the celebrated basketballer LeBron James once said, ‘You have to be able to accept failure to get better.’
And one could say it’s very much the case with meditation.
But here’s where it’s different.
There’s an interesting irony present in meditation practice, and it’s this.
The purpose of meditation is to create an ability in the mind and body to be still – and be happy to be still, in mind and body, for an extended period – without needing to engage with thoughts, or entertainment, or any kind of distraction – so the mind and body can rest, rejuvenate and heal.
And here’s where the irony occurs.
The seeming ‘problems’ that appear as we meditate, which we think are interfering with the calm and serenity we expect? They don’t mean stillness is disappearing, nor do they indicate that we’re ‘failing’.
Not at all. The ‘problems’ are appearing because stillness is getting stronger.
Because stillness reveals whatever stands in its way.
So the more we practice being still, the more we notice everything that causes us not to be still – all the habits, quirks, tensions and anxieties that have been allowed free rein in our life, but which we’d lost awareness of. They all appear in the space that stillness creates.
Trouble is, we think all these things are ‘problems’. But they are not problems at all. Rather, they’re opportunities.
In my book, ‘Being Still’, I relate how one of my teachers burst the bubble of my worries about appearing to fail at meditation:
“… a monk I worked with in Sri Lanka used to scoff whenever I mentioned I was having a problem with meditation. He would say, ‘The problems are the meditation. The problems are the work. All the calm and happy stuff you like so much, which you think is good meditation … it’s not. It’s just little holidays before you get back to the real work.’”
So what is the real work? What is the skill we’re building with meditation?
Well, put simply, we’re training the most agitative aspect of our mind – our attention – to calm down and go still on the breath.
With the attention quietly disengaged and still, the mind becomes a bit like a car with its motor idling – we are aware, but not engaged. Awake, but with out attention on the breath, we’re practicing not reacting with anything.
The more we practice this, the more our attention becomes used to resting on the breath. Without the usual incessant signaling coming from our attention interacting with things, mind and body gradually learn to surrender into a passive state.
And in that mental space that appears, awareness strengthens. That is, we become more aware of things we’d been oblivious to before – because we were too busy paying attention to all our life business.
And it’s this expanded and strengthened awareness that causes so-called ‘problems’ to appear – tensions in our body, daydreams, un-resolved emotional reactions and worries – like rocks appearing out of a dissapating fog, they appear in our silent, meditating awareness.
And because our mind and body are self-adjusting and self-healing organisms like the rest of nature, all we have to do is keep our attention as still and detached as possible, and mind and body will naturally resolve these ‘problems’. No need for affirmations, stretching, or visualisations – they do it all on their own. Essentially, we’re releasing command of our mind and body and handing them back to nature, and natural forces, to repair, rebalance and heal.
And some of these things resolve within seconds, while other things need to be revisited over days, weeks or even months as we meditate each day.
A couple of decades ago, while I was in Thailand, I met a group of Burmese refugees. They were all enthusiastic practitioners of meditation. And when they gathered over cups of tea, they used to share updates with each other, on what ‘problems’ they were observing as they meditated. With great fascination, they’d relate how the aches, pains, emotions and so on, would appear, seemingly strengthen, then disappear as they kept meditating over different periods of time. They looked forward to the ‘problems’ appearing, so they could observe the way their mind and body adjusted, and changed, and cause the ‘problems’ to naturally disappear. In this, they regarded meditation as a form of purification – a cleansing of mind and body.
So all these ‘problems’ you think are getting in the way of your meditation – as the monk said, they are not problems at all. They are opportunities. They are the work. So every time you think you’re ‘failing’ at meditation, be glad that you’ve got the opportunity to deal with one more bit of dysfunctional baggage left over from your life
…………………………………………………………………………………….
Roger’s book, ‘BEING STILL – MEDITATION THAT MAKES SENSE’ is available now. Just click on the links below:
AUDIOBOOK (including ebook & MP3 exercises) – AUD $25.00
