Meditation “Mistakes” that Increase Suffering

by Rumzz Bajwa Content Marketer

Due to struggles and difficulties that people encounter in life, many have come to walk the Spiritual Path and put meditation to practice. These people have experienced immense sorrow, frustration, and devastation that led them to suffer at one point in their lives. They hope to offer their minds the gift of time through meditation as a most welcome respite.

Everybody who has come to practice meditation, only to stop abruptly and start over again after a while, encounter difficulty in developing a good and reliable routine. Many practitioners quit after getting frustrated and find themselves back to square one with suffering as a result.

One of the biggest mistakes that people commit is that they use meditation as a means to an end. They wrongfully assume that they’ll feel better and even find peace just by meditating “well enough.”

The other common meditation mistakes that people commit and would want to avoid include:

● Attempting to re/create a meditative experience

Engaging in meditation can bring forth a feeling of pure euphoric bliss. That’s why those who have experienced it have attempted to recreate the experience.

There’s a need to stress that the lights, colors, sounds, images, even the full-body feeling of euphoria, auras, out-of-body experiences, and anything else that happens within the meditation are mere phenomena. All of them don’t have any significant relationship with awakening.

It pays to remember that the point of meditation is to help people ease into the awareness of mind and life movements as a whole. People commit the mistake of focusing solely on recreating a particular meditative experience. Doing this will cause the practitioner to miss the purpose of meditation as the mind and spirit veer away from their neutral witness role.

To prevent this from happening, everybody should remember to relax and just allow anything and everything to come and go. Nothing needs to be created nor removed.

● Sitting too long early on

A lot of people do many things all at once at the onset of meditating. Part of the mistake often made is believing that “sitting long enough” in day one speeds up the transformation to Zen Master in an instant. This doesn’t bode well to the mind and spirit as they get exhausted and broken early into the process.

It’s best to do one or two minutes of meditation for the first few weeks and gradually build up from there until reaching at least 20 minutes per day.

In reality, meditation is like lifting weights. It’s a mistake to start off and do too much too soon, or else the result is more detrimental than beneficial. After all, it’s not a competition, and no rewards will be given for prevailing against harsh conditions and adversity. The key things to remember are: Start slow, take the time, and enjoy the journey.

● Trying to quiet the mind

Perhaps the primary purpose of meditation for people is that they use it to silence the inane chatter that takes place within the human mind when they really shouldn’t. It only causes additional inner conflict because the mind cannot be used to quiet itself. It’s not within its interest to cease continuing and furthering its own significance. In the end, the inner conflict will just provide additional fuel to the mind instead of quieting it.

The ideal thing to do is, well, nothing. As meditation practitioners, it’s best to learn how to be passive, non-reactive, and patient. In this instance, observation is a superpower, although it takes a bit of time to settle and let thoughts come and go.

● Having expectations

It’s common for people to engage in meditative practice due to one or more of the following reasons:

● They’re overworked and underpaid

● They’re grieving over a loss

● Their minds are giving-in to worry

● Their relationships aren’t working out

● They simply want to feel better

● They’re on the brink of giving up, among other things

Just like the attempt to quiet the mind, holding any expectations out of meditation creates inner conflict and causes one to engage in a tug-of-war with the inner self. Any expectations will cause a delay in getting anything from meditating. On the contrary, not wanting anything makes receiving something faster -- peace of mind.

This peace of mind is cultivated through being aware of what is. Instead of clouding the mind with thoughts, it’s better to meditate without expecting anything. This way, there’ll be no fuel to add to the mind as it starts to quiet down and resolve its inner conflicts.

● Quitting right away

People can get a bit demanding when it comes to getting results. After spending twenty minutes a day for two days in a row, they already expect significant gains. All too often, when the mind is still wandering by then, and the feeling of anxiety is still present, it’s easy to get frustrated and think of everything as a big waste of time.

Meditation can be like taking a walk in the fog. The effects can go unnoticed at times, but they’re there, and things are indeed starting to take shape. After all, there’s no definite timeframe for the mind to settle down. It’s only a matter of being patient and being able to tell the mind to relax.

Ultimately, the wrong way to do meditation doesn’t exist. All of the “mistakes” that people commit only cause more suffering at worst. Suffering only makes them more eager to come back and try meditation again.