Why Do People Stop Meditating (or Never Start?)

                             

                Many people do not want to meditate.  Many other people start meditating and then stop, either in a short time or in 6 months or a year.  Why do people resist doing and/or continuing to do meditation?  If meditation is something I truly want in my life, how can I avoid joining the legions of people who have dropped out or never started?

                My experience as a meditation teacher is a bit unusual.  I have taught in retreat-type settings, in churches, and in one-on-one situations.  What is unusual, is that I also have 5 years of teaching meditation as a for-credit, two 2 hour sessions per week, degree-requirement-satisfying(humanities category) college class:  Buddhist Meditation Traditions:  Principles and Practice.  A large part of the class required students to write about their experiences with the meditations they were learning, and to turn in their report to me on a weekly basis.  This, along with conversations with students, gave me a unique window into how they were responding to what we were doing.

                Over the years, this unique teaching experience gave me some understanding of where resistance to meditation comes from.  Once, a student told me “My mind is a minefield, a war zone—I don’t want to go there.”  This is not an unusual attitude. We don’t want to really see what is going on in our minds, emotions, and lives because it can be painful, ugly, or messy.  But “not going there” just keeps us stuck in our dysfunctional responses to life--forever.  Meditation can require a bit of courage if we are to work at the deepest levels of our suffering so that we can finally heal ourselves.  We must get out of denial about our lives and acknowledge that our suffering exists.  “Suffering exists” is the First Noble Truth of the Buddha’s teaching.

                Another time, a student commented in class that “Meditation is causing me to have anxiety.”  This is also not unusual.  Typically, what is going on here is that meditation is not causing the anxiety to arise; it was simply allowing repressed anxiety that was already there to come to the surface and allow the student to finally get in touch with it.  This is a good thing because it is then possible to make friends with it and discover its roots—then something can be done about it.

                 I also heard “I don’t want to find out how screwed up I am.”  But in fact if we can stop judging ourselves for having “bad” emotions and thoughts we can then look at and understand our “screwed-upness” and begin the process of changing things and healing.

                I also learned that some people stop meditating because “It’s boring.”  But boredom is just another mental/emotional state like anger, anxiety, fear, or joy.  In meditation we learn to sit with it, make it the focus of our meditation, and get curious about it. What does boredom actually feel like in the body?  What is the thought stream that is part of my experience of boredom?  We are training ourselves to open to our experience and eventually learn to be ok with that experience, whatever it happens to be, and sometimes to get in touch with what is underneath the boredom---not having discovered what we want our life to be about, not having meaningful relationships, or believing that anything we do will fail so why bother, or…whatever it may be.

                Another big stumbling block is the idea that “I won’t be any good at it.”  We can go deeper here to understand what is underneath this one.  Often, this is an avoidance strategy for not meditating, and also something that is based on a misunderstanding.   The point of Buddhist meditation is not to get good at it, or to judge the goodness or badness of our meditation sessions.  The point is to learn to stop creating so much suffering for ourselves and others.  If meditation is helping to do that, that is all that is important—not how many times you get distracted.

                Then there is “I’m too busy and don’t have time.”  But here we can remind ourselves that these  are the times when we really need to meditate.  We always can make time for the things that are important to us, and what could be more important than reducing the suffering we are needlessly creating?

                In the beginning, people often see meditation as a “magic bullet” that will fix everything in their lives in a few weeks.  When it doesn’t do that, they quit.  Meditation can lead to enormous positive changes but it won’t “fix” everything in a few weeks.  But you will start to gain some positive benefits—perhaps a little less anxious or a little more focused—in a few weeks, and more and more benefits as time goes on.  It’s like exercising.  If you are out of shape (or have never been in shape) a week or two of exercise does not fix everything, but you will have started to feel more energetic and strong.

                Next comes “I don’t want to take the next steps that meditation could lead to.  I might have to make big changes in my life and people will think I’m weird or a fanatic or no fun, I won’t fit in anymore, I might have to quit my job.”  But…you get to decide what changes you make.  And besides, do you really want to fit in to the insane society in which we live?  Take a long, hard look at your friends and family—is living “the way you are supposed to” and “fitting in” making them happy and at peace?

                People also stop meditating because they started when they were feeling very stressed out and unhappy.  After a while, they began to feel a little better so they stopped meditating (somehow failing to grasp the connection between meditating and feeling better).  It’s like noticing you have gained a lot of body fat, going to the gym and eating better, losing weight and feeling fit, and then going back to eating junk food and being inactive.  This is trying to use exercise to manage your symptoms rather than getting at the underlying causes and eliminating them permanently by adopting exercise (or meditation) as a lifetime process

                A key question in all of this is:  “What is it that you really want meditation to do for you?”  Help you relax, be less angry, calm a racing mind, fix all your problems in a few weeks, experience some other dimension, have some sort of spectacular cosmic experience, feel blissed out…?”  Buddhist meditation is not about having a “feel good experience,” although that’s fine if it happens sometimes.  It’s not trying to achieve some specific state of mind—calm, at peace, blissed out.  It’s about learning how to get in touch with, observe and see clearly your immediate surroundings and present internal states(body sensations, emotions, thoughts) in order to learn how to create less suffering for yourself and others. And of course, getting a little calmer will help with all this.  Eating high quality food as a way of life leads to a lifetime of health.  Meditating as a way of life leads to a lifetime of reduced suffering and peace.

                And lastly, if you work at the level of your obstruction—then you get big results.  This means being willing to look at and work with the places where you are truly stuck in life.  Looking at these, often scary, places in yourself requires a little courage.   But if you don’t work at this level your results may be small and you may lose motivation (“Why bother?)  Big results are highly motivating.  Smaller results are also motivating, and we need to train ourselves to notice them.  We can ask ourselves:  “Do I get angry less often and when I do does it wash through me sooner?”  “Do little things upset me less?”  “Am I more patient?”  This is the place to look for results, not in passing judgment on the quality of your meditation sessions (“I still get distracted all the time, I’m not getting any better at meditation…etc.”).

 

 

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