The Counterintuitive Thing About Meditation

[Kubia]

Sometimes meditation is a struggle, sometimes it goes effortlessly.

Why?

There is a quote (my translation from Italian) from a book by Osho that was illuminating to me lately.

Quote

 

Outside life is like a cyclone in a perpetual state of conflict, confusion and struggle, but it is only so on the surface; likewise, the waves, with their deafening din and their perennial battle, only ripple the surface of the ocean. 

Life is not all here; deep down there is also a silent center, devoid of sounds, conflicts and clashes. At the center, existence is a silent and relaxed flow, a river that flows without a fight, without a struggle and without any form of violence.

 

 

In my opinion, in this phrase lies the answer. 

When you’re trying to meditate, but you still attached to the surface, you simply suffer in name of meditation. You expect that meditation will do something for your surface affairs (aka survival), so you can’t even meditate in the first place. This is counter-intuitive.

When you meditate correctly you can go deep in the abyss of yourself, in your own womb. But to do that you have to let go your grip from the surface, the world, the manifestation of reality or what you call it.

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When i first started meditation, i had numerous groundbreaking experience without any effort, right in the beginning! Why? Because honestly i thought meditation was a scam! Ironically, i touched also high feats in my life effortlessly, because i was so detached from the outcome that my life had an incredible flow.

Later, when I thought that meditation was the source of my success, the magic of it suddenly stopped. Because now i was expecting that meditation will improve myself for external affairs. So my mind was totally grabbing the external world (the waves of the surface) and put in my meditation (the silent abyss). So i wasn’t meditating at all! My position, my breath, the silence or music, nothing worked because the core principle of it was missing in the first place.

Trying harder is futile.

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So, are you meditating for something in particular? You're expecting something to happen in your life?

It's just a simple realization, but for me, it made all the difference in the world in the quality of my meditation, and it's side effect.

Hope it helped.