How to Make Yourself Miserable in Meditation
Here at Instinctive Meditation, we try to be accommodating to all the different types of people there are. You may not like our approach, which emphasizes healthiness. In case you want to make meditation complicated and fail at it, here is a handy guide.
– Sit in uncomfortable postures. The Lotus pose looks cool, and you can feel virtuous as your legs cramp.
– Meditate longer than you want to or need to. Two hours should do it.
- Try to blank out your mind.
– Ban specific types of thoughts, such anything having to do with your to-do list, your friends, or your life.
– Resist falling asleep, no matter how tired you are.
– Sit in a stuffy room.
– If you are a woman, study meditation with men who are terrified of women and try to control them.
– Choose a tradition or meditation that reminds you of the worst aspects of your childhood.
– Choose a teacher exactly like the sandbox bully who ruined your life when you were 5.
– Try to block out your inner voices.
– Worry about whether you are being a good meditator.
– Use a mantra that grates on your nerves.
– Worry about whether your chakras are balanced or not.
– Resent all noises and sounds you hear.
– Wear new, uncomfortable contacts while meditating.
– Try to get your thoughts to slow down.
In case I didn't list the perfect Odious Rule for you, just make one up – anything that totally goes against your grain is OK.
Odious Rules
There is a part of your brain that thinks its Job Description is "helping" you to meditate. It helpfully generates Rules such as "You should not be you," or "You shouldn't exist the way you are." The rules may be very specific, such as "You should not think at all during meditation. Ever." Or the rule may be a one-size-fits-all, simply, "You are wrong." I call these Odious Rules, but when they are coming at you from inside your head, they just seem like "what's true."
A lady came by the other day to learn to meditate. First she apologized for having so many thoughts, when we meditated for a couple of minutes. Then she apologized for crying, because she thought of her grandchildren and wept with gratitude for them. Then she looked at the garden and went straight into samadhi with her eyes open, and she was totally silent and in deep peace for about ten minutes. There was a light coming off her body, she was so silent and in peace. Then she looked at me and apologized, saying, "I'm sorry, my mind went blank and I lost track of time."
The beauty of this woman's Rule generator was that it was able to instantly, on-the-fly, generate a rule making her wrong. This Rule Generator didn't blink, didn't pause for a breath, even when she went into the most beautiful, perfectly poised spontaneous samadhi state I had seen in a long time.
A man was in his first meditation session, and it turned out that his rhythm was about 90 seconds. He would sort through thoughts for a minute or so, and then suddenly and with no announcement his brain would stop generating thoughts and would just be silent for five or ten seconds, in pure repose; then he would start thinking again. During much of this cycle he was so relaxed he couldn't move, and in ten minutes of meditating, his mind and body would just go through this cycle again and again, thoughts, restlessness, pure silence, thoughts. After ten minutes he opened his eyes and started objecting strenuously, "That's it? Just five or ten seconds of silence and then I have to start listening to my thoughts again?"
One way of finding out if you are being run by an Odious Rule you have going is to notice whatever you call “difficult.” If you have any feeling of difficulty at any time during meditation, check in with what rules you have made up. When people say meditation is “difficult” and I ask them to describe in detail what is going on, often one or more of these is going on:
– Many thoughts are coming and everyone knows you aren’t supposed to think during meditation.
– Some thoughts flash through very rapidly and everyone knows thoughts should obey the “thought speed limit” and move slowly, gracefully, with immense decorum, like a funeral procession.
– Sensations in the body are calling for attention and everyone knows that the body is supposed to be numb during meditation.
– I can feel alternating relaxation and tension, and everyone knows that tension is supposed to instantly disappear, like kitchen stains do in TV commercials.
– Emotions are welling up and I don’t want to feel them. Everyone knows you’re not allowed to cry during meditation. Or else, “unauthorized” emotions are coming up: You feel playful, rebellious, sexy, defiant, ambitious or creative and everyone knows those are taboo.
– I feel too restful. It can't be right, to sit here in a state deeper than sleep, not thinking at all, just barely breathing. I have to be doing something.
Your Internal Manual of Meditation
What you are encountering here is your internal manual of meditation. It was scratched onto your nerves by whoever was your nemesis when you were 4 or 5, whoever yelled at you to stop. There was a time when you were doing your thing, and some exhausted, near-nervous-breakdown adult looked at you with hot laser focus, targeted you in her or his crosshairs, and said, "Sit still, put your hands in your lap, don't wiggle, and PAY ATTENTION." You got clobbered with a blast of shaming energy that burned its way through your skin right into your brain.
Therefore this pattern gets invoked whenever you do something similar to "sit down, shut up, put your hands in your lap, don't wiggle, and focus." Meditation is a perfect fit. That's why when people set out to meditate, one of the first obstacles is this inner character, who was actually just trying to keep from going insane and killing you.
Now class, let's call this the Kindergarden Complex.
Your personal Kindergarden Complex is actually your container – it consists of the nerve and muscle pattern you developed to contain your wild impulses. It's almost like an inner character with its own personality.
When you were 5, you may not have known very much about yoga. You did not know how to sit still and allow your energies to flow freely. You probably tensed some of your muscles to inhibit your movement, and perhaps restricted your breathing to diminish your energy level. So you split into at least two beings: the wild you and the One Who Controls. In this way, you joined the world. The controlling part became like a ghost, feeding off your vitality. Meditation is the perfect time for this inner character to exercise its control over you again.
Inner characters never give up. They wait forever for the opportunity to come out again. Yours will actually try to pick your meditation teacher and path for you. Your Kindergarden Complex will make you feel attracted to whoever will try to control you or shame you just so. And Meditation Land is absolutely packed with entitled and domineering men and women with invisible rulers in their hands to zap you.
Have you ever known someone who got into a relationship or married someone who embodied the worst aspects of their father or mother? The same principle applies in meditation and yoga. The word "yoga" means union, an inner marriage, and many people are in bad inner marriages with their Kindergarden Complex.
Unless you want to have your meditation or yoga practice be the consummation of a marriage to your worst enemy, learn to recognize this Ding! of similarity, the secret Masonic handshake exchanged by your inner Controller and the outer Meditation teacher or Yoga teacher. Aha, there is the Dominator. Then just bow slightly, honoring them, and go your way. If you stay for more than a minute, you will probably become hypnotized and start thinking something like, "Must . . . still the mind . . . . must obey teacher . . ." Charismatic teachers know instantly how to manipulate you.
In my practice as a freelance meditation teacher, I constantly meet people who are coming out of bad relationships to meditation teachers. They are just as wrecked as people getting a divorce, but on a subtler level. Meditation teachers can get inside your head like no one else – it's really the worst boundary violation possible. I have worked with many people who were taught by their guru to visualize the guru inside their head.
Most of us think in icons anyway – we make up little movies and montages of people's faces, then add sound effects and feelings. That is what thinking is.
In meditation, the thinking goes deep, so there is the possibility of deep manipulation. It's exactly like advertising, but on the level of the soul. All gurus and entitled spiritual teachers know how to broadcast commercials to your deepest television set, the one in the core of your being, and say, "I am the key to your salvation. Come to Me. You will be safe in me."
The guru tradition has over the past thousands of years perfected systems of inner enslavement. They teach techniques that get people to turn themselves into slaves, and believe that this is a spiritual thing to do. It's beautiful, in the way that vampires are beautiful in Anne Rice novels.
Spontaneous Generation of Odious Rules
If you are sitting in a group of ten people for a meditation class and the instruction is given, “OK, let’s all close our eyes and find something about our breathing to enjoy,” maybe five to seven people willl find something to enjoy. One person will sit there sort of perplexed, not knowing where to begin. A couple of people will be sitting there scowling.
If you ask one of the scowlers what he is doing, he might say, “I was trying to block out noise.” Inquiring further, you would find that he was starting to become aware of his breath, then he heard a sound somewhere, then he briefly wondered what the sound was, then he invented an Odious Rule on the spot that he should not hear the sound, then he got angry (or else he was recalling an internalized, angry parental voice) then, disgusted, he returned to his breath. This all took place in five or ten seconds. This guy or gal is not going to have a happy time in meditation. His critical inner voice will win every time. Not only that, but it will get to score a hit on him by proving that he failed at meditation.
Be alert when you are starting to make up an Odious Rule, and start making fun of it. The rules can vary from person to person. For one person it may be “You have to make your mind blank,” and for another it might be, “You have to believe in the teacher,” or “You’re not allowed to feel too happy,” or “Mood swings must be controlled.” Sometimes it is just the voice of the Inner Rebel that must be banned, and obliterated with the drone of the mantra.
When I am working with individuals or groups, it is as if everyone's Kindergarden Complex is sitting on their shoulder or above their heads, waiting for me to say something that sounds familiar so they can resume beating the person up. If I don't come up with some Rules, the people will start scowling at me.
Your Invisible Friends
A woman, Katrina, came by for a session, after studying Tibetan Buddhism intensely for the previous decade. She was good looking, 37, with a beautiful aura about her. She had been doing certain Buddhist visualizations for seven years, and one of the techniques she had been doing was to visualize her teacher as the incarnation of Buddha, then see him sitting in her crown chakra. And then merge with him. But then she found herself getting more and more inhibited as he got more and more inside her head, controlling her.
It was a complex and in many ways a rich relationship, for he was worshipping her at the same time he was using magic and incantations to control her. He was feeding off her energy at the same time he was creating her to be the incarnation of a dakini. Over time, she found herself unable to enjoy sex with her husband. She felt like her teacher was always spying on her. She also quit her job as a yoga teacher, because she felt disconnected from her students and the other teachers in the studio.
When I met her, she had been divorced from her husband for several years, and living off the settlement money. She also distanced herself from her Tibetan Buddhist meditation teacher. She was afraid to break up with him, afraid that some sort of horrible backlash would shatter her life, but she had worked out a gradual way of distancing herself from him.
Talking to her was like interviewing a walking manual for How to Make Yourself Miserable in Meditation: Advanced Techniques. There was one revelation after another. We found out that years earlier, before the divorce, she had visualized her Tibetan teacher so totally that it was as if he was in bed with her when she was with her husband, he was there as a third person. And she liked it, once or twice. But then, she couldn't tell her husband about it, and the whole thing started to feel very creepy, and that started to drive a wedge of alienation between her and her husband. No one talks about this stuff.
Katrina was actually in the midst of three divorces: from her husband, from her career as a yoga teacher, and from her Tibetan teacher. And maybe a fourth divorce, from herself, from seeing herself as the Very Special Student of her teacher. She was beginning to realize that she couldn't trust her teachers, or herself.
I never found out if she was actually having sex with her Tibetan teacher. I did not ask and did not want to know right then. Usually, there is some sexual contact, but it takes quite a few sessions for people to confess to something like that. It is extremely common and many American women are wearing a Scarlet Letter, written in Sanskrit or Tibetan, because they have been lovers with the teacher, until he dumps her for a younger woman.
Playing House
Let's change the name slightly and instead of saying Katrina was practicing Tibetan Buddhism, say she was playing house. Ok I'm the good little girl, and there is the altar with a statue of Buddha on it. I am making house for Buddha in my head. OK, now I am going to bow down to the statue again and again. If you saw an adult woman spending hours playing house with Buddha as an imaginary friend, and becoming increasingly dissociated from her daily life, you would worry a bit. There might be an intervention.
If this was a psychiatric drug Katrina was taking, then some alert psychiatrist would have observed: "The patient experienced loss of libido and consequent damage to her bonding with her husband. Her primary relationship was thus weakened, and she turned to a fantasy relationship, having long, detailed conversations with the mental image of a Tibetan. She then engaged in compulsive apotropaic behavior, doing 100,000 prostrations to a photograph of a dead Asian male on her altar. Becoming increasingly disconnected from her life, she quit her job, divorced her husband, and is now floating in limbo."
People who take psychiatric drugs – SSRI's – Paxil, Zoloft, Prozak, often speak very honestly about the benefits and negative side effects of the drugs. But honesty almost does not exist in the field of meditation. There isn't even the language for it. And it's as if there is a total taboo on even speaking realistically about meditation. Is it because meditation is still viewed as something so precious that it can't possibly have bad side effects? I don't actually know.
But one thing Katrina has to show us – new chapters are being written daily for how to make yourself Miserable in Meditation!
The taboo you really need to break is the taboo against being healthy, lively, and free. This is the scariest taboo of all, because when you approach the activity of meditating in a healthy way, you violate all the dysfunctional rules you may have learned along the way: don’t feel, don’t think, don’t wiggle, don’t ask questions, don’t be angry, don’t be sexual, don’t doubt, don’t be a rebel, don’t do it your own way, do it the official way.
* ap·o·tro·pa·ic
PRONUNCIATION: p-tr-pk
ADJECTIVE: Intended to ward off evil: an apotropaic symbol.
ETYMOLOGY: From Greek apotropaios, from apotrepein, to ward off : apo-, apo- + trepein, to turn; see trep- in Appendix I.
OTHER FORMS: apo·tro·pai·cal·ly —ADVERB
- The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, online