What to Do When Your Back or Legs Hurt and Thoughts Arise During Meditation

Looking at the situation

You sit down to meditate, and five minutes later your back hurts, your legs have gone numb, and you are getting angrier. Sitting there feels unbearable, and you want to turn it off. How should you respond to difficult states during meditation?

First, treat meditation as an ordinary event in your day. Frame the question this way: “What if I am doing something during the day and my body aches?” What if I am recording a video, sitting down to talk with my child, meeting with my boss, or going to a store, and I get a headache, or my body aches, or I find it hard to do something, or I cannot concentrate?

I sit down to draw and cannot concentrate. I sit down to write a report and cannot write it. I sit down to read a book and cannot read. I sit down to watch a movie and cannot watch it, so I turn off the TV. What is happening to me?

You need to look at this question more broadly, because meditation is not an isolated event set apart from the rest of your life. A meditative state is a state that is either present or absent in your life.

It is a state to work toward or observe throughout your life—not just when you sit down to meditate or happen to be in that state.

The human body is not alive because a person works out at the gym. In fact, exercise can make someone’s health worse. Running can worsen their health rather than improve it. The body stays alive because a person does not lie in bed all day. If someone did not get up or move at all for three weeks, for example, they would be in serious trouble. Ordinary movement, simply moving around, sustains the life and development of the human body.

In medicine or sports, no one tells you how much time you should spend talking or how much time you should spend looking at something. Isn’t that strange?

There are techniques that tell you to pay attention to your breathing. But there is so little discussion of observing it continuously. Simply paying attention to your breathing throughout the day is guaranteed to change your state. Just keep paying attention to it, rather than doing so only during a special time you have set aside.

Instead, someone sits down, breathes properly for half an hour, and then goes out in the evening to drink wine and smoke a cigar. Why did he spend 30 minutes breathing that morning? It is hard to understand. What was the point? He was even suffering through it. He ended up in the state described in the question: sitting there, suffering during meditation.

Why does a person not suffer when drinking alcohol? Because their perception has narrowed.

What happens when you turn your attention toward meditative perception? When someone sits down, they do broaden or shift their perception a little. For example, they sit down and are told, “Look at your body.” At last they start looking at their body, and they feel bad. Why should they feel good?

If their perception were expanded while they were drinking alcohol, they would simply scream in pain. Their perception has narrowed. The next morning, it has not expanded; it has only returned a little toward what it was before, and they feel bad. If it actually expanded, they would feel as bad as it is possible to feel.

At a certain degree of expanded perception, they would not perceive anything. They would not feel bad. With expanded perception, they simply would not do certain things, because they would see that they were moving toward suffering or setting up effects of alcohol that would extend four, five, six, seven, or ten years into the future.

A friend and I met in Cairo recently. He said, “I have a WHOOP wristband. If I drink wine in the evening, my heartbeat will be disrupted at night. The wristband shows me that. I finally saw it.”

I asked: “Have you stopped having wine from time to time?” “No, I haven’t. But I have begun to understand how it affects my health.”

I said to him: “Do you know that drinking wine has an irreversible effect on your spiritual system for four to seven years?”

Of course, he will erase that from his awareness. What does the effect of certain processes on a person’s astral body mean to him? It will be wiped from his awareness for good.

That is what you should be afraid of, not feeling less than great the next day, with WHOOP picking something up, and then lying down to sleep again while your body says, “Okay, at last we can recover.” His HRV goes through the roof, and he says, “Look, it’s good! I’ve recovered already.” It is going through the roof because you put your body under so much strain.

Once someone approaches the question by observing how they feel throughout the day, they can begin to find real answers during meditation.

Their perception has expanded; they have begun to see things more broadly. They have started to feel impulses and outside influences affecting their state and the expansion of their perception. Something is influencing them, preventing them from breaking free, and fighting back.

That is why we see people dressing up bad events, hiding the truth, putting up a veil so that a person cannot see what is really happening or what the real problems are.

I joke that rich people go to the bathroom too. Think about it that way. Boys have their own examples when it comes to girls. This is not a joke; it is energy. What energy is a person tuned in to? What do they want to feel and see? What do they actually want to know?

As soon as you begin to see a broad spectrum of energy, your illusions fall away. You begin to see the truth. When you talk to someone close to you, you do not wait for the automatic answer, “I’m fine.” You want to understand what is actually happening.

I could ask my daughter endlessly, “How are you?” and she would say, “I’m fine,” every time. It is simply an automatic answer. What is behind it? What does “fine” mean? At that point, you need to stop asking the question; it is meaningless. You ask it automatically, say it automatically, and cannot break the habit.

It seems to me that society in the United States has deliberately made that question completely meaningless. You meet someone and say, “Good afternoon.” They say, “How are you?” and you both keep walking. In other words, “How are you?” is not a question you need to answer. It simply means “Hello.”

To a Russian person, that seems strange, but it is what society has come to. It is simply a built-in expression. Let’s accept that and not dwell on it; everyone knows perfectly well that it is not a question. Of course, in a normal relationship, that is not how it works: you actually find out how the other person is doing.

But does everyone really want to know how someone is doing?

I often use my mother as an example. From time to time, I say to her, “Mom, ask me questions about that, and I will absolutely tell you what is going on. You don’t ask.” Why doesn’t she ask? Is she afraid of what she might hear, or is she not interested?

• There are areas that do not interest her. That is obvious.
• And there are areas where she does not want to face negative things or know about certain negative things, even though she can tell me some negative things herself.

For example, I always say, “Mom, if something isn’t going well for you, please tell me. I can discuss any bad news quite easily.” I try to take bad things calmly, without going into a hysterical reaction in mind and body, although there are things that can get to me too.

What happens to someone during meditation? They go into a hysterical reaction in mind and body. They begin to see more bad things but cannot handle them, or they start expanding their perception and encounter aspects of energy they want to work through. It may be the structure of the ego, the presence of Luciferic programs or Ahrimanic programs, cause-and-effect connections, damage to their spiritual being, or an underdeveloped astral body, etheric body, or “I.” Just as a lack of development in your physical body produces a certain response, a lack of inner development produces a response too. And you begin to shut down.

There are also things you cannot change. For example, I have never in my life been able to sit in the lotus position. Someone from India once told me, “I will show you a yoga exercise. You need to sit like this.” I said I couldn’t, because in that position, I would not be thinking about meditation. I would be thinking about how not to die from the pain. For some people, it is easy. For me, it is about the same as someone grabbing my tongue and pulling it hard. Some people do not understand, but to me, it is the same kind of pain. I cannot sit like that, in those positions. He said, “Well, then there won’t be any yoga.”

A person needs to understand that there are certain things they will never change in their astral body. There is always the possibility of a divine event, though, just as a divine event might allow me to sit in the lotus position one day. Could that happen? It could.

I allow for a very interesting possibility that many people will find strange: a person can alter their physical body, even to the point of changing the color of their skin in a particular area or healing an injury considered incurable—for example, bones that have healed out of alignment.

I accept that this is possible. I do not know how to do it. I cannot do it. I have never seen a single person do it. But I truly do allow for the possibility. Not because I am fooling myself or fantasizing. That does not mean I am trying to develop those abilities in myself. I really do accept that it is possible.

That is what I mean by the changes that may be possible.

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