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

GAGalya

During meditation, memories, images, and pictures come up.

Or,

for example,

when you sit down to meditate, your back starts hurting and your legs ache. You cannot sit through it.

Certain states arise: irritation, anger, wanting to turn it off. What—

What should you do? Should you pay attention to it?

And if there is something unbearable at the level of the physical body,

what should you do then?

AVAlexander Volchek

First of all, you need to treat meditation as an ordinary event in your day.

Reframe the question you are asking 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 to my child, meeting with my boss, or going into a store, and I get a headache, my body aches, something is hard to do, 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 it.

What should I do?

I sit down to watch a movie,

cannot watch it, and turn off the television.

What is happening to me?

The question you are asking

needs to be considered in a broad context.

That is very important.

You need to consider it in a very broad context. A very broad one.

Why?

Because meditation is not an isolated event set apart from the rest of your life.

A meditative state is a state that is either constantly present or absent from your life as a whole. 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.

A human body does not stay alive because a person works out at the gym.

Working out at the gym may make their health worse.

Running may make their health worse, not better. It can make it worse.

The body stays alive because, in general, the person is not lying in bed all day. If someone does not get up for, say, three weeks and does not move at all,

they will be in serious trouble.

Ordinary movements—ordinary movements in general, simply moving around in everyday life—

are what keep the human body living and developing.

Ordinary activities, different activities.

By the way, Galya, if you look at medicine or sports, people do not talk about how much time you should spend talking.

Strange, isn't it? Or how much time you should spend looking at something. There are techniques that tell you to focus on your breathing, to pay attention to it.

But so little is said about it.

So little is said about observing it. So little. Yet simply paying attention to your breathing continually throughout the day will change your entire state.

That is guaranteed.

Look, guaranteed. Just breathing.

Simply pay attention to your breathing continually. Continually, not during some special period set aside for it. Someone sits down and breathes properly for half an hour, then goes out in the evening to drink wine and smoke a cigar. Why did they spend thirty minutes breathing that morning? I do not understand the logic. It is unclear why they did it. They might as well have spared themselves the torment. They were struggling, too. They entered exactly the state you just described: they sat down and suffered during meditation.

Why am I talking about this? Why are you not suffering when you drink alcohol?

Why are you not suffering? Why not?

Because their perception has narrowed. What happens when you direct your attention toward meditative perception, when you direct your attention?

When a person sits down,

they do expand their perception a little, or shift it. For example,

they sit down and are told to look at their body. They finally 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 returned a little toward what it was before,

and they feel awful. If it had expanded, they would feel truly awful.

In certain aspects of perception, that is.

In some areas of expanded perception, they would not perceive any of that at all.

They would not feel bad at all.

They would not feel bad, but with expanded perception they would take certain actions,

because they could see themselves moving into suffering or creating certain effects. For example,

drinking alcohol creates effects for four,

five,

six,

seven, or ten years ahead that cannot be undone. Not just—my friend and I recently met in Cairo, and he said,

“Sasha, listen, I have a WHOOP wristband. If I drink wine in the evening, my heartbeat is guaranteed to be a mess that night.”

“The wristband shows me that. I finally saw it.”

I said—

I said, “Have you stopped drinking wine?” He said, “No, I still drink sometimes. I have not stopped, but I have begun to understand how badly it affects me. I have begun to understand how it affects my overall health. It has an incredibly powerful effect on my health.” I said, “Do you know that drinking wine has an irreversible effect on your spiritual system for four to seven years?”

Irreversible. Of course, he will erase that from his awareness. What does the effect of certain processes on a person's astral body—on the 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 is good! I have recovered already.” It is going through the roof because you went overboard and put your body under an incredible amount of strain. So, Galya, when someone approaches the question by observing how they feel throughout the day—how do I feel now?

Right now.

Then, during meditation, they will be able to find real answers to why they feel that way.

Their perception has expanded. They have begun to see more broadly.

They have begun to feel certain impulses exerting an influence

from outside on their state of expanded perception. Something is influencing them, preventing them from moving beyond it, and resisting.

You need to understand that your spiritual being contains a great many energies and impurities that do not particularly want your perception to expand, because as soon as it does,

you will want to destroy those impurities,

those energies. You will want to get rid of them.

As soon as you begin to perceive them, you will want to get rid of them.

That is why we see bad people

and bad events being dressed up a little in the world. Their truth is hidden behind a kind of veil,

so that a person does not see what is actually happening there, what is really happening,

what is truly happening and what the real problems are.

I always joke that rich people

go to the bathroom and poop too,

right?

If you really think about it—well, boys have their own examples involving girls.

This is not a joke.

It is energy.

What energy is a person tuned to? What are they tuned to? What do they want to feel and see? What do they truly want to know? As soon as you begin to see a broad spectrum of energies, your illusions fall away.

You begin to see the truth and live in it. When you talk to someone close to you, you do not wait for an automatic “Everything is fine.” You want to understand what is really happening. I can ask my older daughter how she is doing endlessly, and she will always say, “Everything is fine.”

Always.

She has no other answer.

It is simply an automatic response.

What is behind it?

What does “everything is fine” even mean?

Then stop asking that question altogether.

Just stop. It is meaningless.

But it is automatic. You ask it automatically. You say it and say it and say it and say it and say it and say it, and you cannot get rid of it.

You want to ask that stupid question: “How are you?”

In America, I think society has deliberately made that question completely meaningless.

You meet someone and say hello,

and they say, “How are you?” and you keep walking.

You keep walking. “How are you?” is not a question you need to answer about how you are doing. It means “hello.” That seems strange to us as Russians, but society has arrived at this: if we casually ask everyone how they are and always say everything is fine, what is the point? It is simply “hello,” a standard phrase. Let us accept that from the start. Accept it from the start and stop dwelling on it. Everyone knows perfectly well that no answer is expected.

Of course, that is not how it works in a real relationship: a person genuinely asks how you are doing. But does everyone really want to know? I always use my mother as an example in different videos. She may not like it when she watches them, but that is how it is. From time to time, I tell her, “Mom, listen, ask me about this subject. I will certainly tell you what is happening. You—”

GAGalya

Mm-hmm.

AVAlexander Volchek

“—do not ask.”

Why does she not ask? Is she afraid of what she might hear, or is she not interested?

There are areas where she is not interested. That is obvious. It makes no difference to her at all.

No difference to her.

And there are areas where she does not want to encounter negative things or know about certain negative things.

Though she herself can direct certain negative things toward me.

For example, I always tell her, “Mom, if something is not going well for you,

be sure to tell me.”

I will discuss any bad thing.

Very easily.

You know, Galya, that you can tell me any bad thing, and I react as though it makes no difference to me. But the point is not that I do not care.

The point is that I try, have always tried, and keep trying—though “always” is relative, of course—

to perceive bad things,

to be able to perceive them, hear about them, learn about them,

and examine them without falling into psychophysical hysteria because of them. What happens to a person in meditation? They fall into psychophysical hysteria.

There are things that can draw me into psychophysical hysteria.

If a certain pattern of bad things connected to me is imposed, or someone close to me tells me something,

that can put me into a difficult state too. I try not to go there either, so I increasingly try to respond calmly when people tell me

bad things. To take them calmly.

What is more,

we live in a society where an endless number of people either hide what is bad or, conversely, make a show of it.

So you sit down to meditate.

You begin to identify a few more bad things.

But, for example,

you have a strong psychophysical reaction,

and you feel bad.

You cannot do anything about it.

Or you have expanded your perception and seen certain aspects of energy that you want to understand.

But this is a structure—for example, the structure of ego, the presence of Luciferic programs, Ahrimanic programs, or certain forces within you,

the structure of your own causes and effects, your damaged spiritual being, the limited areas of your spiritual being, or the underdevelopment of your astral body, etheric body, or I.

Underdevelopment itself, just like the underdevelopment of the physical body, produces a certain reaction.

Your own underdevelopment produces a certain reaction.

And, of course, a person

begins to get blocked by those reactions.

But there are things, Galya, that you cannot change.

I have never in my life been able to sit in the lotus position. There was an interesting episode in my life.

A person from India said to me,

“I will show you a yoga exercise. You need to sit like this.” I said, “I cannot sit in that position. It is impossible.”

It is simple: when I get into that position, I am not thinking about meditation.

I am thinking about how not to die right now.

For some people it is very easy. But it is like someone grabbing your tongue and pulling it very hard. That would hurt. You would hardly sit there meditating.

Some people cannot understand that. For me, the pain is about the same.

I cannot sit in that position, in those circumstances. He said,

“Then there will be no yoga.”

Then there will be no yoga.

There are certain things—

and this is very important, by the way—

where I understand, in general,

that I will never sit in a particular position in my life. I do not create an illusion that I will.

Similarly, a person needs to understand that there are certain things

they will not change in their astral body. Never.

They will not change them.

Of course, there is always

the possibility

of a divine event. A divine event could also lead to me sitting in the lotus position. Easily.

It could lead to that.

It could.

Of course it could.

In my thinking, I leave room for a very interesting possibility that may seem very strange to many people.

I allow for the possibility that a person can alter their physical body.

I do. Even to the point of changing the color of their skin in a particular area.

Or healing an injury that cannot be healed. For example,

bones that have healed out of alignment.

I allow for the possibility of doing that. I do not know how to do it.

I cannot do it. I have never seen a single person do it.

But I allow for it with my whole system.

I allow for it very clearly. It is not that I—my openness to that possibility is as clear as my knowledge that you have two eyes or that I have two eyes. It is just as real. My openness to that possibility is very real.

It is truly real. I am not deceiving myself.

I absolutely allow that it is possible.

That does not mean I am searching for it intensely, trying to develop those abilities, or sitting at it all day and night.

I do not know how to do it. I simply allow

that it is possible.

That is in terms of the changes that are possible.