How meditation taught me not to fear discomfort

I think that new years resolutions are both a crock of shit, and also pretty helpful in creating intentional change in our lives.  A central tenet of Buddhist Psychology is being able to hold two contrasting views as simultaneously true, so that’s the skill I’m employing here.

Sometimes people want to make a New Year’s Resolution about meditation, and they ask me why meditation is important.  There’s a lot of buzz about meditation practice, but why does it actually matter?  What happens when we meditate?

I have a hard time pitching meditation.  Its effects are so individual and multidimensional.  I’ve recently started talking about the ‘alchemy of meditation’, a phrase my clients have described as ‘annoying’ and ‘vague.’  I get that, but it also feels like it’s the best word for it.  It’s a seemingly magical and mysterious process of transformation, with something of real value coming out the other side. In an attempt to be more specific, I’ll tell you about one way that meditation has changed my experience in the world: the transformative power of not panicking about discomfort. 

One aspect of Buddhist Psychology is the foundational importance of Shamatha meditation.  This means ‘peaceful abiding’, and basically it means just sitting there, being with your breath, and tolerating your intolerable mind.  It’s simple, but it’s not easy.

One thing that happens when you meditate for any decent length of time is that you get physically uncomfortable.  Sitting in any position and not moving starts to feel crappy after a while, and it’s interesting to watch what your mind does when it starts to feel bad.  Early in my meditation journey, when I started to feel physical discomfort during meditation, my mind had a total field day.  I felt the perpetual knot in my right shoulder start to tighten, and I thought, “Oh here we go. This is only going to get worse. How long are we sitting right now? It’s going to get so much worse. I’m going to be in so much pain. It’ll probably be excruciating.  How bad would it be if I just gave up?  Maybe I should just give up.”  And I mean—this would occur approximately five minutes into a meditation sit.  The fear of how bad the discomfort would be was debilitating.  My mind would spin in the panic of discomfort. 

Over the years, I’ve learned to work with this discomfort in meditation differently.  When I notice discomfort, I just plain notice it. ‘Oh, my shoulder feels like shit? Interesting.’  Then I allow my awareness to let it go.  Then I feel the discomfort again, and my attention gets called back.  Sometimes the pain escalated, but many times, to my great surprise, it just stayed the same, or even dissipated.  And when it did escalate, I just watched it escalate.  Nothing was going to happen. No one was going to die because my shoulder hurt.  Sometimes my shoulder really hurt, and I felt agitated and frustrated, and I laid down in the meditation sangha to give myself a break.  And again, nobody died. 

You can replace physical pain with mental suffering, and the lesson is the same.  Meditating when I am feeling anxious is so difficult for me.  Sitting with that a feeling that begs for busyness for the sake of busyness is no picnic.  Sometimes I feel even more anxious when I first sit down, and I think, “Meditation doesn’t work! I’m feeling more anxious! Who thought this was a good idea?!”  But if I just stay with the feeling, and with myself, my mind and my breath, I see that I can just be with it.  It’s tolerable. Sometimes it evolves and changes into a different feeling, sometimes it doesn’t.  I sit with it either way.

Riding out discomfort and seeing where it leads us is an incredible lesson in workability.  All things are possible if we believe the situation is inherently workable.  If we stay in the actual feeling and don’t fall into the fantasy of how terrible this will be, or the story about what this means about us, the feeling itself is actually workable.  One gift of meditation is watching myself ride out these discomforts, seeing that I can do it. The fear of discomfort lessens when we’ve ridden it all the way to the end, and seen that it evolves, or doesn’t, and we survive.  And most of the time, it’s not that bad.  It’s always workable, and nobody dies.

(Especially due to my Buddhist Psychology training, I feel the need to clarify here that, in fact, everybody dies.  But that’s a topic for another blog, and I trust you to understand my point.)

The lesson translates off the cushion as well.  I believe that meditation was the foundational step in making a big change in my career, having hard conversations, and taking risks the way I do now.  I don’t avoid things because they will probably be uncomfortable, because I know I can tolerate it.  You can too.

I often integrate aspects of meditation and mindfulness into my therapy and coaching.  I don’t make anyone meditate if they don’t want to, and I do think it’s incredible tool to better understand our minds.  So if you’re interested in exploring meditation, maybe make a New Year’s resolution out of it.  Or not.  Whatever floats your boat in that department.  When you’re ready to explore the practice as an aspect of your personal and interpersonal development, let’s talk.  There’s so much to learn about ourselves in this mysterious process.  I wonder what you’ll find?