“It is important to understand that the process of cultivating mindfulness won’t always make us feel good. The inner illumination of how our minds work, our habit patterns, and our reactivity can be uncomfortable. At least initially, we would rather not know about this stuff. We would like a quick fix. But this is the stuff we have to meet, understand, embrace, and investigate if we want to make it to the third ennobling truth—where distress can come to an end.”
—Christina Feldman

t a certain point in practice, your head feels like you’re trapped in a wrestling ring with a crazed sumo wrestler. This meditation business was supposed to make you more calm, peaceful, and happy, but that’s not your experience. Oh, sure, maybe in the beginning, but now it’s just bringing up so much emotion and fearful thoughts that you’re struggling. So you assume you must be doing it wrong. Or it doesn’t work. Or that it’s just not for you.

The voices in your head work on you to try to get you to quit. Because they’ve been in control for so long, this is just one more way they’ve figured out how to get involved and screw everything up.

And who could blame them? They SHOULD work to get you to quit because meditation and doing the practice of deep inner work is designed to free you of them.

And boy do they have no interest in you being free of them!

Therefore, they make you believe that the point of meditation is to experience calm. Make you assume that a clear, empty mind is the goal. Make you compete with standards of what this practice should be like and how far you are in comparison to others. Make you obsessed with the nonsense you encounter when you meditate (from bright lights to tingly limbs), so you focus on those instead of the present. Make you like or dislike what’s happening. Make you regret you ever started this nonsense.

At the Zen monastery, we had a term for this condition: Going further, faring worse.

I was shown that voices heating up and going ballistic was a good sign. It was evidence that I was on the right path. If I didn’t experience resistance, I was playing into the voices’ game, and they were quite happy with that.

My encouragement was to keep going and continue to sit, despite the howling voices (that later became subtle saboteurs). If I did that, I had the opportunity to practice with “real” situations in my life that could overwhelm me into suffering. I was, in fact, training for those moments. I couldn’t expect to face death, trauma, bad news, insults, injury, addictions, and time with family if I hadn’t practiced with the “easier” things first. Just like I wouldn’t learn to run during a marathon or practice my violin during a recital.

This is why I encourage my students and clients to practice with whatever is going on in their lives right now. Especially during the easy times. Practice when things are going well – when you’re happy, and the voices are having a hard time getting their foot in the door.

When they do, you’ll be ready. You’ll be skilled enough to handle whatever they throw your way. Because that’s what you’re practicing for.