Why Everything Gets in the Way During Meditation

If your back hurts and thoughts keep intruding during meditation, perhaps you have begun to see what you don’t notice during the day.

A person sits down to meditate, and their back starts to hurt. Various thoughts come, some images appear, their legs go numb, irritation arises, and they want to switch everything off and immediately say, “I can’t meditate.”

Let’s take a broader look. What if during the day you are writing a report and your head hurts? What if you are talking with your child and find it hard to concentrate? What if you go into a store and your body hurts? Or, for example, you are watching a film and can’t keep watching it. What is really going on? Why is it specifically in meditation that a person immediately concludes that something is wrong with the meditation itself, with the place where it happens, with the people who practice it?

Meditation is not a separate event that has dropped out of your life. It is not some special island you have gone away to, where your body is supposed to become perfect, your thoughts are supposed to disappear, and you are suddenly supposed to turn into a calm person.

You sit down and begin to perceive. If you have finally begun to look at your body, why should it immediately feel good? Perhaps you have simply begun to see what you don’t see during the day. Perhaps your body has been tense for a long time. Perhaps your thoughts have been racing for a long time, but you don’t hear them. Perhaps the irritation was there, but it was covered up by other activities.

It’s like breathing. You can spend thirty minutes breathing properly in the morning and then go drinking wine or smoking cigarettes in the evening. And what was the point of those thirty minutes? If attention to your breathing doesn’t appear during the day, it is just a separate exercise. The same goes for meditation.

As your perception expands, you may begin to see pain, thoughts, irritation, difficulties, energies that don’t want you to expand your perception. And this is not necessarily a problem with meditation. It may be the first honest, real moment when you have finally seen yourself.

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