Is meditation difficult ? Yes and No - here is why

It seems difficult when we are not used to sit idle doing nothing physically. Away from phone, TV, book or news paper of any kind of distraction.

Inaction or “non doing” of any sort is meditation.

Here is what typically happens when one begins to meditate.

You sit one place, silent, close your eyes and start feeling your breath. Following will start drawing your attention. Some external sensory input - a noise, some smell, cold or hot breeze. These are perceptionary distractions - external input received through senses and filtered and colored through mind/memory. These may immediately lead to some old memory and your mind drags you there.

Second types of distraction is body sensations. These are not externally generated events but happening on or within your body. Most popular one is feeling of itching on some part of your skin. Urge to move bodily, adjust position, some slight pain in legs, hands or stomach or head.

Connected to these perceptions and sensations - mind brings loads associated memories and generates feelings and you are active in terms of thoughts.

Meditation in simple sense is JUST (I am saying just… to down play) being aware of sensations, perceptions, thoughts and feelings.

How can we do that? being aware or watching these? Eventual state to reach is “being” not doing anything. So you go from doing “watching” or “witnessing” to just being.

when you start watching - what is watching? who is watching? Watching is also a THOUGHT (interestingly). So watching is doing parallel execution of watching thought (let us call it as “watcher thread”) and other thoughts, perceptions, sensations etc (let us call them as “other doing thread”) - switching the attention back and forth between them. Similar to a computer processor running multiple threads of computing.

What can go wrong here? and what does go wrong is - watching/witness thread merges with “normal” or other thread of thoughts, perceptions, feelings and sensations”. So there is only one thread. Act of watching ceases. For many this may appear as failure of meditation. But it is not - sometime sooner, you realize that watching thread has ended and merged with “other doing thread”

This awareness that watching has ended is indeed success of the process of meditation. Goal of meditation is to be aware of “awareness” as much time as possible while the “other doing thread” keeps going.

So when you realize you lost the watching thread - start it again without any feeling of lost or failure etc. With love and smile start watching again. In a session of 1 to 5 mins of initial practice - you might lose watching thread about 50–80 times. Slowly this number starts reducing and your watching ability amidst all chaos that mind and body can bring.

Try …