When you learn to meditate, you will often encounter a lot of obstacles throughout your sessions and practice. This is nothing to be ashamed of because everyone goes through it because when we learn to meditate, we are learning to work with our mind and adjust with works and doesn’t work for us. This article is going to explain some obstacles we face when learning the art of meditation and actually applying it and how we can work through them.
Even if we want to meditate, there are times when we just don’t feel like it. Sometimes it’s because we are too tired, other times we’re too busy, or sometimes it’s just an excuse not to meditate at all. If you don’t feel like meditating for the usual amount of time that you usually do, it’s a good idea to shorten your meditation time for that day, even if it’s just for 3-5 minutes at a traffic light. If you don’t, and the less you meditate, you will lose all ambition to meditate at all until you stop meditation altogether. The key is to keep going, even if your mind is trying to trick you into not feeling like it.
If you’re sitting still while in meditation, you might feel like your mind is wandering or that parts of your body feels uncomfortable for sitting for a long time. It doesn’t matter if you’re a beginner or advanced learner, restless will happen, and it does. If you find yourself feeling this way, you might want to listen to relaxing music, find a point of focus such as an ocean, or mountain scene, or chant to relax. It’s important that to calm your restless spirit, you need to allow some time to get comfortable and not launch into your meditation practice right away so you don’t feel like you’re rushed, too distracted, etc.
Of all the biggest obstacles that a practioners encounters when he or she learns to meditate is the self-defeating fact that they don’t believe they are good enough to do so. This is a fallacy of the mind, because the mind is afraid and is dealing with life from a different exercise, angle, or perspective. When it comes to meditation, the idea of being whether or not you’re a good meditator is just silly. The art and practice of meditation is not a contest for who’s bigger and better, but a self-improvement process that builds up over time to center the self and to bring it to the original source of where you came from, which is your spiritual essence.
