Common experiences in Meditation
Welcome back to the final part of this series on experiences of meditation, part of our weekly mindfulness and wellbeing blog here at StudyStream. We’ve covered lots of different aspects to our experience of meditation over the past few weeks. Today, we will cover other common experiences people may have when meditating. Let’s get into it!
Common types of experiences
It’s common to be thinking about how you are doing the practice and, correspondingly, judge yourself for how you are doing the practice. This might include constant thoughts like ‘Am I doing this right?’, ‘I am not doing this properly!’ or ‘I can’t do this’. Like any other thought, learn to notice how these too are ‘just’ thoughts, and upon noticing this, return to the object of focus for the practice you are doing.
‘Let yourself off the hook’
The ancient sages commonly talk about how compassion and kindness go hand in hand with mindfulness. Partly this is because they recognised how easy it is to be self critical and judgmental, even when we are trying to meditate. They encourage us to try to be as compassionate towards our own experience during a practice as we can — learning to be kind, empathic and to have grace — to ‘let yourself off the hook’ — during a practice. Just trying, even just participating and giving it a go, is good enough. Try to think of your own mind as a little child that keeps wandering off — how would you help guide a young child who has wandered off to come back?
Try to ‘stay’ with the discomfort
Like we have mentioned before, people may find their attention gets drawn to certain parts of their body where they might feel pain and discomfort — commonly in the back and shoulders — where we tend to carry the most pain and tension. Or similarly, people may have very difficult or distressing feelings or thoughts — maybe something from the past, or a thought about the future, or something entirely random. Like we previously discussed, try to ‘stay with’ the discomfort as best as possible and for as long as possible. You might notice it start to transform, or you might notice the way you think about the pain can change. It’s important to say that you should never do something that you find too uncomfortable and you are the ultimate judge of what you think you can handle. Always stop if you feel like it’s too much for you to bear at this stage.
Judging your practice?
It’s also easy to judge the practice. Notice thoughts like ‘this is boring’, ‘this is stupid or silly’, or ‘I don’t know what I am supposed to be feeling or experiencing’ or ‘it’s not doing anything’. Notice as well how we can judge the ‘quality’ of a practice — we can say ‘nothing is happening’ or ‘this is a bad practice compared to last week’. Also notice how we can judge it in a ‘positive way’ — this is a ‘good’ practice compared to the last one. Mindfulness is not a ‘word thing’ — it is not about labelling or judging a practice in one way or another, whether good or bad or neutral. Mindfulness is about noticing that we are judging — that we are ‘thinking’- and returning instead to the object of focus.
What to do about tiredness
Another common experience is tiredness. Some people find themselves becoming extremely tired and unable to stay awake during a practice. This is usually because people are carrying such a large amount of tiredness in their body but they are often not aware of just how deeply tired they are. When the mind is quietened and stilled, the tiredness can become overwhelming. Try to stay with the tiredness as much as you can — try to recognise how tired you are, and to ‘feel’ the tiredness as much as you can. Ultimately, if you end up falling asleep, that is OK. But it might be useful to shorten the time you do practices so that you finish practicing around the time you usually fall asleep. Or it might mean practicing in a sitting position or on a sitting bench. Falling asleep is OK, but over time it is more beneficial if you can try to maintain the practice awake rather than just falling asleep.
Conclusion
Mindfulness is a practice that can be deeply personal and transformative. People have described profound experiences of peace, joy, meaning and truth. It can also be extremely difficult to do, and can bring up immense fear, terror and pain — requiring us to cultivate deeper and deeper levels of patience, grace and courage. Like a reflection of life, mindfulness practice can ask us to face and confront both difficulty and success. People have often regarded mindfulness as sacred because ultimately it is a safe space where, if we can stay with the practice and are committed, consistent and dedicated to it, it will always provide us with a way through, where we can come out the other side as more rounded, authentic and real human beings.
That’s all for this five part series on experiences of meditation. Join us next time where we will start a new series looking at the mechanisms and science of mindfulness. And remember to join us every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 19:30GMT in the Secondary School FocusRoom (we use this as a combined session for both rooms) for live and free mindfulness sessions. We look forward to seeing you there!
