Patience
Meditation isn't all sitting beautifully in a perfect ray of bliss. What do you do when you don't feel like meditating? Do it anyway. Why?
Have you ever tried to meditate, and from the first moment you began to prepare, there was a great reluctance to get into it?
From her book, Places that Scare You, Pema Chodron has this to say about the importance of staying with discomfort and reluctance to meditate:
In meditation we discover our inherent restlessness. Sometimes we get up and leave. Sometimes we sit there but our bodies wiggle and squirm and our minds go far away. This can be so uncomfortable that we feel it’s impossible to stay. Yet this feeling can teach us not just about ourselves but also about what it is to be human. All of us derive security and comfort from the imaginary world of memories and fantasies and plans. We really don’t want to stay with the nakedness of our present experience. it goes against the grain to stay present. These are the times when only gentleness and a sense of humor can give us the strength to settle down…
So whenever we wander off, we gently encourage ourselves to “stay” and settle down. are we experiencing restlessness? Stay! Discursive mind? Stay! … I can’t stand this another minute! Stay! That is how we cultivate steadfastness. [...]
Coming back to the present moment takes some effort, but the effort is very light. The instruction is to “touch and go.” we touch thoughts by acknowledging them as thinking and then we let them go. It’s a way of relaxing our struggle, like touching a bubble with a feather. It’s a nonaggressive approach to being here.
In the basic principles of Centering Prayer, there is the similar instruction of ‘returning ever-so-gently to the sacred word’ when thoughts begin to get louder.
As to why it is so important to persevere when you don’t feel like it - in addition to Pema’s wise words above, it is related to that very foundational aspect of human existence I referred to in my earlier post on neural re-wiring:
Habits, whether good or bad, stick due to the reward processes in the brain. Even if the action is not good for us in the long run, it provides a short term sense of happiness and pleasure, leading the brain to store the process and repeat it when cued…
Humans constantly face the choice of which habit will be reinforced, whether we are conscious of it or not.
By impatiently stopping meditation after a few minutes because you don’t ‘feel like it’, you reinforce the habit pattern that if something feels uncomfortable or ‘boring’, you turn away.
On the other hand, when you stay with boredom, discomfort, or other so-called negatives, you reinforce the habit pattern of staying and potentially learning something valuable from it.
When you watch a brilliant musician play a musical piece flawlessly with impressive mastery, do you have an awareness of the many thousands of hours of playing ‘boring’ scales and other exercises as well as the time spent specifically refining and memorizing that piece of music?
No?
Most people, I think, simply enjoy watching athletes, chess players, or really anyone who has honed a skill to an incredible level without much significant awareness of how many hours each day were spent in repetitive practice preparing for the performance or event.
It is the only way humans master anything at all.
Yes, it is true that what I do for a living, and have done for 30 years, is run a Kumon afterschool math and reading centre, and yes, Kumon is all about practice, practice, practice.
I started in Kumon when I saw how much my eldest child, then in early elementary school, had improved in her skills after only a few months of daily practice of math. But while I have seen clearly from directly observing thousands of students that years of daily practice is astonishingly transformational, it has been the other disciplines like neurology that have made it clear why that is the case.
It’s wonderful news in a way that practice can be transformational. right?
But the other news that isn’t so popular is that the greatest gains come from continuing with it when you don’t feel like it, building those deeper habits of steadfastness.
And patience.