Why is meditation so controversial? Why doesn't it work for some people but for others it explodes?
Some people approach meditation like a technique only, a practice, a thing you must do with great focus, without deviation, without error, like following your breath, or "doing nothing", or watching your thoughts. This forms a central aspect of meditation, of cultivating awareness, attention, single-pointedness of mind. However, it is not the whole story.
If meditation is supposed to transform your very relationship to reality, the very way you interface with life, your meditation must reflect this. Such a thing is not simple. It's a complex equation that involves unwinding patterns of your mind, of beliefs, attachments, desires, drives, reactions, responses, habits, notions. In short, it involves deconstruction. In meditation, you have to deconstruct the notion
that you are a person sitting with your eyes closed
that there is a world outside with things happening and things needing to be done
that tomorrow or today or right now there are things needing to be done
that you fundamentally care about what happens today, tomorrow or at any time
that you have a life with goals and places you want to be and places you don't want to be
that you are in control of your bodily movements
that your bodily sensations correspond to a notion which you call your physical head or face
that you have a head or face
that you are sitting somewhere
that you are sitting
that you are breathing
that you are awake
that you have eyes that are looking at an empty space behind your eyelids
that the feelings under your butt or feelings all around in your body correspond to the notion of a body that exists in physical space
the list goes on...
You want to identify and go underneath all the notions that you project onto reality, consciously and unconsciously. For example, when identifying the notion that you are sitting on your butt and that your feelings under your butt reflect this, drop the notion and focus on the feelings. Feel them for what they are in themselves. Harvest all your effort and attention and try to feel exactly what they are. Then contrast the feeling with the notion you previously connected to them, the notion of a butt sitting on some surface, and see how vacuous that notion was.
The notion created an imaginary object in your mind that the feelings were slotted into. But when investigating the feelings themselves, the object was nowhere to be found. The feeling in themselves are like vaguely scattered pins and needles and feelings of pressure with no definite location or structure. But this is only one trivial notion out of hundreds and maybe thousands that you have to sort through before your consciousness lightens to the point where it can uphold states of Enlightenment. For every notion you investigate and drop, your consciousness becomes a little more fluid, a little more clear, a little lighter.
Additionally, meditation is fundamentally experimental. There is no set recipe for what to tackle first or for how long to tackle each thing or in what way. It's whatever your mind throws at you, and you attend to that with all your abilities. There are so many different moods, states, headspaces and bodily configurations (breathing, posture, feeling into energetic movements, devotion, sensuality, vulnerability) that you are capable of inducing and that can be conducive to deepening the meditation, and they must all be tested. Harvesting the power of your intuition and imagination and fundamentally trusting yourself and trusting the process is the only process.
All in all, your full energy and attention should be on how you can crack this nut of existence and dissolving the patterns that keep you stuck, harvesting your imagination, intuition and reason to uncover the techniques and hacks on how to do that, while releasing all blockages on all levels (bodily, emotionally, psychologically). It's the biggest project that you can embark on and requires all of your intellectual capacities, all of your intelligence, all of your devotion and passion. And in the end, you have to willing to give up everything for knowing the truth of existence and merging with Divine Love and Consciousness.
