Question: I’ve been meditating for about a year now and I’ve only just worked my way up to 20 minute sessions. I do enjoy it while I’m doing it, I like how I feel after and I know that it does me good – but it still feels like a chore to me, because it’s so difficult. Does that ever stop? I feel like not looking forward to it is not how you should feel about meditation. Or maybe I’m doing it wrong.
I will say the first year or so of meditating is very difficult. It’s time consuming, hard, sometimes even frustrating. We often get bored, discouraged, or even give up. It can definitely sometimes feel like a chore. Even for me, 15 years of meditating, can sometimes feel like a chore and I just don’t do it.
From my experience, when I meditate just for the sake of meditating, the session becomes easily and very quickly boring, and I often feel lethargic within minutes. However, when I meditate with a purpose or an “action plan,” the 20-minute meditation session that I planned suddenly becomes 45-60 minutes!
I definitely know the feeling of getting to a point and just not knowing what to do next. You sit and think to yourself, okay I know how to meditate but now what? We have to remember, Buddhist meditation always has a purpose. And that purpose is not to simply “clear your mind.”
We have to go back and remind ourselves, why am I studying and practicing Buddhism? Among the list of answers, one of the top answers should be “to end my suffering” or “to escape the cycle of birth and death.” So we take those answers and we meditate on it. Buddhist meditation is to help us attain wisdom, a mind free of ignorance, greed, and anger so that we can see things as they truly are.
There are many ways to practice Buddhist meditation. There are a plethora of different guides, techniques, steps, etc. Of course, having a “clear mind” is part of our Buddhist meditation practice, but that is not the end goal. That is just the beginning. It is actually the pre-requisite to true Buddhist meditation.
Once we’ve developed a calm, silent mind – or at least a semi-calm, and silent mind – then we can move on to different forms of meditation. There is contemplation meditation; that is where we take a topic/subject of practice and contemplate on its teaching so we can fully understand, grasp, and master it. And there is meditation to help us reach different states of consciousness, which is the most advanced form of buddhist meditation (the meditation on the Four Jhanas).
So don’t feel discouraged. It’s okay to feel like it might be a chore, but if you remind yourself why and what you’re meditating for, that will hopefully help encourage you to want to meditate. It doesn’t even have to be a long session. It can be short and sweet, 5-10 minutes. And then as you develop your meditation, you can continue to add more time.
Smile and be well!