In continuation of my series to provide answers to the common questions, this post taks about meditation and the changes (or lack of) that ensue. I have seen this question being repeated by many as people try to understand whether or not what they are doing is working. Such is a need of instant validation that we often lack the wisdom of trusting the process. During this post, I thought to provide the question that was asked and my response to that. I hope this will be helpful for people in similar dilemma.
I have been meditating for 15-20 mins every day, at the same time, in the same place, for a month. Despite this, I still feel like during meditation, my mind is racing all over the place, my body hurts, I get sleepy, etc. Also, in my daily life, I still react to stress exactly as I did before starting meditation. What am I missing? This isn’t working.
Response:
Dear Friend,
First of all, congratulations on your journey and building some continuity. May I ask how do you meditate?
You say you are meditating for a month but you do not witness any change. Kindly allow me to share what I have received from my spiritual practices. Awareness and/or realization is not a matter of time. Time is just a construct or metric we as humans use. Isn't time different in different realms? and what is time for something that doesn't begin or end? Awareness and or realization depends on the breakthrough (for lack of any other expression or my command over the language). Awareness comes with the ability to observe and by being in alignment with the universal energy (let's say your true form). In other words, awareness depends on our ability to connect.
If I may ask how do you know that the meditation is not working for you? If your criteria is that your mind is still racing or if you still react to stress as earlier, then it may not be the right criteria. Many a times, we do not see the outcome on the surface. But, much like a seed that takes time to grow (until it comes our of surface level), we don't see the development or evolution happening. Rest assured that both the development and evolution is taking place, and you will see it eventually. If you remember, a bamboo seed takes almost 5 years to penetrate the earth surface but once it does, it grows upto 60 feet in less than couple of months. All we need to do is continue and not give up.
While from your question it is not easy to pin point on the specifics of your practice or method of meditation, I request you to keep it simple and have no expectations of a particular outcome. Growth will come, just may not always be in the way you expect it. Having said that, I can assure that all of your questions and concerns will simply go away as you make progress. The way to make progress is to continue with the practice. Even if you just use an object of attention or just observe your thoughts without participating, this itself will begin to raise your awareness as your capabilities increase.
While you may have started to meditate recently or doing it from some time, you still need to develop a disconnect or a delay from thoughts and actions. When you start to be aware of your thoughts and process them without automatically acting, you will start to act and react differently as will that important delay between your thoughts and actions. The greater the delay, the more control you will develop over your actions. Eventually, you actions will not be an outcome of automatic actions, but a carefully processed reasoning. I can tell this from my own experience.
Then there is this aspect of if you are giving yourself sufficient time to calm your mind. From being a monkey mind, it takes practice and larger behavior changes that prepares our mind to be more aware. I found that I needed to sit for longer duration to prepare my mind before I started to make changes to my behavior and daily activities. Once that happened, it allowed for observation and eventually awareness to appear.
Kindly do not think I am trying to question your practice of knowledge, I am simply providing perspective as someone who tried meditation many times in my life and failed miserably before I could make the breakthrough required for me.
I sincerely do urge you to continue and wish you all the best for your progress.
With blessings!🙏