One of the tricky things about meditation training is that it requires effort.
This can be off putting and hamper any progress!
In our world of immediate gratification, at the touch of a button - it can seem hard.
The effort we need to apply isn’t the strain that you see on the faces of people lifting weights in the gym - they are training their bodies (an external phenomena). In meditation we are training our minds (an internal phenomena).
Effort can often seem like strain and as a result if we put too much of the wrong effort into our meditation then it can hamper any potential good results. We need to apply a gently but determined effort when in meditation. At the time when we are focusing on a particular object, if we are too tight with our concentration then we crack it and if we are too loose then it slips away. This is often why people refer to meditation as an art. To get the balance of mind. To bring the mind back home to where the heart is. When the mind is in balance there is harmony within.
If we practice meditation correctly we can get the feeling that we have returned home - we have found a place that we can dwell, shelter and take refuge in, away from the madness of the distracted world. We discover this home through a determined effort to focus and place the mind on its chosen object. When we meditate we need to enter into the session with a chosen object to focus on - otherwise we end up just drifting. Which may be relaxing to some degree but won’t actually engage and train the mind.
Lets take for example a neutral introductory object of meditation like the breath. When we engage in meditation on the breath we need to be on the look out for the mind becoming distracted away from concentrating on this process. Which it will do - not just in the early days of meditating but years down the line! The mind will want to focus on distractions that are not the breath. So we need to be alert in meditation on the look out as and when the mind becomes distracted. When it becomes distracted to bring the attention back to the breath and again and again and again.We try to keep engaging in this process with gentle effort. This is the beginning of ‘training the mind’ in meditation.
Meditation practice is a training and to achieve good results requires us to bring the mind back to its chosen object. If we are engaging in a meditation that lasts say twenty minutes we may become distracted one hundred times. This doesn’t meant that the meditation is not working. It’s working if we keep bringing the mind back ‘home’ to its object.
If we practice like this we will start to see a difference in our meditation and life.
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