We all need encouragement and support for continued faithfulness in the daily practice of prayer and meditation. That is why meditating with a group and having an available instructor as resource for your spiritual practice is so foundational for what we think of as spiritual growth. I want to address briefly here a couple of areas of concern that are often viewed as difficulties in meditation practice, and what lies beneath them.
The first is something I’m sure we have all had ample experience with: sleepiness. Sleepiness in meditation comes in a variety of forms: outright napping, a dullness of awareness, lethargy, fogginess, tiredness. Attentiveness and wakefulness are lacking at these times. Meditation is “sitting awake.” So what do these forms of sleepiness show us?
They can be symptomatic of the culture in which we live and the speed with which we are expected to work and the volume we are expected to accomplish. Within the setting of instantaneous communication where we expect to get what we demand in short order, we then rush through the workday trying to keep ahead of the growing pile in the in-basket, or ballooning number of emails coming at us on our blackberries or iPhones, or laundry piling up because we can’t remember when the last day off was. We sit down to meditate and promptly take a nap. Or drowsiness can show us how out of touch we are with our bodies, that we would escape into sleep rather than sit awake with what is there. We may be using sleepiness as avoidance expressing our reluctance to look at what is there in meditation, just as we would experience laziness and reluctance in facing difficult tasks. Sleepiness that comes from tiredness means we need more rest, but sleepiness can also come from resistance when we don’t want to face, remember or experience something. This indicates fear and wanting to avoid difficulty. We may not want to face loneliness, grief, emptiness or loss of control.
Look at sleepiness with compassion. The body is tired. Are you so busy that you do not get enough rest? Are you afraid to rest. In rest we become quiet. Are you afraid of the silence you would have to face in rest and no activity. Is there an inner judge driving you, telling you that you are lazy? The inactivity of meditation is anything but being lazy! Sleepiness in meditation can serve to bring us to compassionate observation of the driven quality of our lives in avoidance of the silence in which we would have to face the truth of ourselves.
Then there is the flip side to sleepiness – restlessness. Like drowsiness, restlessness can come as a response to something we don’t want to feel. There is both a restlessness of body and a restlessness of mind. In both cases meditation becomes scattered, and it is difficult for attention to remain in the present moment. Again as with sleepiness, observe the restlessness without condemnation or judgment. Examine what it feels like. What does it do as you sit open to it? Be with the restlessness of mind without getting caught up in its story, noting simply how it bounces around. Trust that the restlessness is temporary, and the conditions that feed it will inevitably change. Restlessness, I am coming to discover, is a jumbled series of thoughts, emotions and sensations, nothing solid or fixed, transitory and insubstantial. And it appears that restlessness just might be symptomatic of a blockage of free creativity waiting to be expressed in our lives, an unexpected gift for us to discover.
Behind all the stuff that comes up during meditation – the emotions, the agenda of the mind – is fear, fear that is a grasping for something we think we desperately need, and fear that is both a contraction away from the reality of life around us with all its suffering, and also a contraction away from the love of God that is there whether asked for or not. That unqualified love is so vast it is perceived as impersonal and threatening to swallow us up. That love eclipses our ego identification and renders it inane and inconsequential. It IS fearful to fall into the hands of the Living God, for God is Love.
The ability of meditation to bring wholeness and healing comes as we are enabled to recognize where in our lives we are contracting away from that wholeness. When we are not contracted we discover that the body and mind have a natural wholeness and expansiveness, that are characterized by joy, clarity, a sense of well being, confidence and a deep sense of knowing. Keep meditating!
Blessings in the Lamb,
Beverly
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