The Fourth Day

Everybody is getting a bit frustrated because the meditation is more difficult than what people expected it would be. The main difficulty is to stay focused when we don’t experience success. A lot of people, I am one of them, have a lot of pain during the meditation sessions. The pain can have a lot of reasons such as back pain because we are not used to sitting up as straight as we have to during meditation. Another reason for the pain is because we are sitting on the floor for a prolonged period of time, our legs are not used to the floor and they start to hurt. Sitting for a long time and concentrating is really not what most of us have done so far. Meditation is not only mentally very challenging but also physically. On top of the pain, it also seems that we are not getting anything out of the meditation; most people including myself haven’t had a successful experience therefore I am wondering where my motivation to keep going should come from.

Our meditation teacher keeps emphasizing that we have to be patient. We will get there at some point. He barely answers any questions that we have because he doesn’t want to lose time. According to him, the more we practice the faster we will be able to enjoy the benefits of meditation. I am trying to truly understand his point but it is really hard to stick to something that is causing me pain, which I don’t understand and that doesn’t give me any benefit. However, since I am here I really can’t do anything else, I just try my best.

At the beginning of the course, all of us have received a little booklet with teachings of Buddhism as well as meditation guidelines. I just recently discovered them and I thought they are very helpful. Tibetan Buddhism differentiates between two types of meditation, one is a stabilizing meditation and the other one is an analytical meditation. A stabilizing meditation is what people usually associate with meditation, which is focusing on one object for as long as one wishes while experiencing bliss, clarity and peace.

The more interesting meditation is the analytical meditation because we meditate on our problems in order to truly understand them. On the root of our problems are mistaken concepts about reality. In order to free ourselves from them, we first have to identity them and transform them by using analytical meditation. Later, having developed those new insights we focus on them with single-pointedness, by using stabilizing meditation, to become thoroughly and deeply familiar with them. In other words, we use both meditation techniques to attain real, lasting transformation of the mind.

After having read about the difference of those two meditation types, I realized that maybe it is possible to treat mental illness with simply meditation after all. I am not saying it is easy but I am pretty sure that it is possible with lots and lots of effort, dedication and a strong belief in it.