Working with Common Problems in Meditation (Bhante Gunaratana)

Bhante Gunaratana, The First Lesson in Calm — Mindfulness of Breathing, Chapter 10: Dealing with Problems

Problems will come up in meditation. Everyone runs into them, in all shapes and sizes. The one thing you can count on is that you'll have your share too. The most important skill in dealing with obstacles is the right attitude. Difficulties and obstacles are part of practice itself. They can't be avoided—and they can be put to use. They offer us invaluable opportunities to learn.

We get stuck in the mire of life because we keep running from our problems and chasing after desires. Meditation gives us a kind of laboratory where we can examine this pattern and work out ways to counteract it. Every problem and every difficulty that surfaces during meditation is something to explore and work with. No pleasure comes without some measure of pain, and no pain is entirely free of pleasure. Life is a blend of happiness and suffering—they go hand in hand. Meditation is no exception. You'll have good sessions and bad ones, moments of ecstasy and flashes of fear.

Where Is the Wall? The Wall Is in Your Mind

So when you hit an experience that feels like a wall, don't be surprised. Don't think you're special. Every seasoned meditator has their own walls. They come up again and again—just be ready for them. Your ability to handle difficulty comes down to attitude. If you can learn to see these troubles as opportunities—as conditions that actually strengthen your practice—you'll make progress. The capacity you build for working with problems in meditation will stay with you for the rest of your life, helping you face the truly thorny issues that come later. If you try to dodge every difficulty that arises in meditation, you're simply reinforcing the very habits that sometimes make life unbearable.

Learning to face unpleasant situations matters. As meditators, our job is to be patient with ourselves, to look at ourselves honestly, and to make room for all our sorrows and flaws. We need to learn to be kind to ourselves. Running from what's unpleasant ultimately does us no favors. Paradoxically, the precondition for genuine goodness is that when unwholesomeness arises, you face it head-on.

If You're Truly in Pain, Don't Look Away

A common strategy for dealing with difficulty is self-suggestion: when something unpleasant surfaces, you tell yourself it isn't really there, or you convince yourself it's pleasure instead of pain. The Buddha's approach is the exact opposite. He asks you to examine it thoroughly—not to hide or dress it up. Buddhism advises you neither to take on feelings that don't belong to you nor to avoid the ones that genuinely do. If you're in pain, then you're in pain. That's a fact. That's what's happening right now. So look at it directly. Don't flinch. When you're suffering, examine the experience. Observe it carefully. Study it. Understand how it works. The way out of a trap is to study it—to learn how it was built. You take it apart. Once the trap is dismantled, it can't hold you anymore. The result is freedom.

Facing Birth, Aging, Sickness, and Death: You Have a Choice

This perspective is fundamental, yet it's one of the least understood aspects of Buddhist philosophy. Superficial scholars are quick to label it pessimism, claiming it fixates on suffering. Buddhist thinkers don't see themselves as pessimists—in fact, it's quite the opposite. Suffering exists in this world, and that's unavoidable. Learning to deal with suffering isn't pessimism; it's a deeply practical kind of optimism. How would you face the death of your spouse? If tomorrow you lost your mother, your sister, or your closest friend, how would you feel? Suppose that on the same day you also lost your job, your savings, and the use of your legs—would you still have hope for the rest of your life in a wheelchair? If you were a terminal cancer patient, how would you handle that kind of pain? And how would you face the prospect of death? You might dodge most of these misfortunes, but you won't dodge them all. Every one of us, at some point in life, will lose friends and family. We all get sick from time to time. And most importantly, every one of us will die. You can be crushed by these realities, or you can meet them with an open heart. The choice is entirely yours.

Make This Clear: Pain Is Not the Same as Suffering

Pain is unavoidable. Suffering is not. They are two completely different things. If any of these tragedies were to strike your mind right now, you'd feel suffering. The habitual patterns governing the mind in that moment would lock you inside the pain, unable to find release. Taking the time to learn how to work with these patterns is a sound investment. Most people pour all their energy into reducing pain and increasing pleasure. Buddhism isn't telling you to stop doing that. Money and security are good things. Pain should be avoided when possible. No one is asking you to give away all your possessions or seek out unnecessary suffering. But Buddhism does suggest you invest time and energy in learning how to handle unhappiness—because some pain simply can't be avoided. When you see a truck barreling toward you, of course you jump out of the way. The same logic applies to meditation: learning to face unhappiness is the only way to prepare yourself for life's invisible trucks.

Problems will come up in practice—some physical, some emotional, some attitudinal. Each one calls for a different response, but all of them are opportunities to free yourself from the self.

Problem One: Physical Pain

Nobody likes pain, but everyone runs into it. It's one of life's most universal experiences, and it will certainly show up in your meditation in one form or another.

There are two stages to working with pain. First, try to eliminate it: find the cause and address it. If the pain persists, then make it your object of meditation. The first step is to check the body. Maybe the pain comes from a headache, a fever, or some illness. In that case, get medical attention before you sit—take your medicine, apply ointment, or do whatever you'd normally do.

Where Exactly Does It Hurt?

Some pain is tied to specific sitting postures. If you haven't spent much time sitting cross-legged, you'll need a period of adjustment, and some pain is almost inevitable. Depending on where the pain is, there are particular remedies. If it's in your legs or knees, first check your pants. If they're too tight or the fabric is too thick, that could be the problem—try changing them. Also check your cushion. When you press down on it, it should still be about eight centimeters thick. If the pain is in your waist, try loosening your belt, and your waistband too if necessary. Lower back pain often comes from poor posture—a slouched position is never going to be comfortable, so sit up straight. Not rigid, but with the spine upright. Pain in the neck or upper back can come from several sources. First is hand position: your hands should rest comfortably on your knees, not raised above your waist. Relax your arm and neck muscles, but don't let your head droop—keep it aligned with your spine.

Watch Your Pain

After making all these adjustments, you might find that some pain still lingers. If so, move on to the second stage: let the pain become your meditation object. Don't rush toward it, and don't get worked up. Just observe it with mindfulness. As the pain intensifies, you'll notice it pulling your attention away from the breath. Don't fight it. Let your attention shift gently to the bare sensation. Go fully into the pain. Don't block the experience—find out what the sensation actually is. Move past your habitual urge to escape and penetrate to the pure sensation underneath.

You'll discover two things happening. The first is the bare sensation—pain itself. The second is your resistance to that sensation. The resistance is partly mental and partly physical. The physical part includes tightness in the muscles in and around the painful area. Relax those muscles, one by one, letting each one go completely. This alone may noticeably reduce the pain. Then you can work with the mental layer of resistance. Just as your body is tense, your mind is tense too. You're mentally clamping down on the feeling, trying to cover it up and push it out of awareness. It's a silent resistance—an attitude of "I don't like this" or "Go away."

Relax the Body, Relax the Mind

This second layer is subtler. No words can describe it with perfect precision. The best way to get the hang of it is by analogy. Look at how you release a tense muscle, then apply the same approach on the mental level. Just as you relax the body, relax the mind. Buddhism sees body and mind as intimately connected—so intimately that many people can't even tell these are two separate steps. For them, relaxing the body is relaxing the mind, and vice versa. They experience the whole relaxation—mental and physical—as a single process. Either way, what matters is letting go completely, until your awareness slowly passes through the barrier of resistance and reaches the bedrock of pure awareness. This resistance is a barrier you've built yourself. It's a ditch, a sense of distance between self and other—the boundary between "me" and "pain." When that barrier dissolves, the separation vanishes. You slip into the surging sea of sensation and merge with the pain. You become the pain. You watch it thin out—and then something remarkable happens. It no longer hurts. The suffering is gone. Only the sensation remains, a bare experience. The "I" that was being hurt has disappeared. The result is liberation from pain.

Overcoming Pain

This is a gradual process. At first, you can only expect to work with smaller pains, not overwhelming ones. As with most skills, you get better with practice. The more you sit, the more capable you become. And let's be clear: this isn't masochism. Self-torture is not the point. This is a practice in awakening, not self-abuse. If the pain becomes truly unbearable, continue meditating but shift your position—slowly and carefully. Observe the movement, feel the shift. Notice its effect on the pain and watch the pain ease. But try not to move too much. The less you move, the easier it is to stay mindful. Beginners sometimes say they find it hard to maintain mindfulness when pain arises. That difficulty comes from a misunderstanding—they think mindfulness is something separate from the pain, but it isn't. Mindfulness can't exist on its own; it needs an object, any object at all. Pain is a mental state. You can be mindful of pain just as you can be mindful of the breath.

The principles we explored in Chapter Four apply to pain as well. Be careful: too much attention is just as unhelpful as too little. Don't embellish, and don't leave anything out. Don't muddy the pure experience with concepts, impressions, or assumptions. Stay present with the pain as it unfolds, so you don't miss its arising and its passing. Pain that hasn't been examined with clear mindfulness gives rise to emotional reactions—fear, anxiety, anger. When you see it correctly, those reactions don't arise. It's just sensation, just bare energy. Once you learn this skill with physical pain, you'll draw on it for the rest of your life. You can apply it to any uncomfortable feeling. What works for pain also works for anxiety and chronic depression. And the skill at the heart of it all—perhaps the most useful and practical skill in life—is patience.

Problem Two: Numbness in the Legs

For beginners, numbness or loss of sensation in the legs during sitting meditation is very common. You're simply not used to the cross-legged posture yet. Some people get quite anxious and feel they should get up and walk around. Others are convinced their legs will die from poor circulation. There's no need to worry about the numbness. It's caused by nerve compression, not poor circulation. You won't damage your legs by sitting, so relax. When your legs go numb during meditation, just observe the phenomenon carefully. Notice what it feels like. It may be uncomfortable, but it isn't pain—unless you're too tense. Just watch it calmly. If your legs stay numb throughout the whole sitting period, that's fine. After you've been practicing for a while, the numbness will gradually fade.

Your body will adapt to the daily practice, and eventually, no matter how long you sit, your legs will no longer go numb.

Problem Three: Unusual Sensations

People experience all kinds of phenomena during meditation. Some feel an itch; others feel tingling, deep relaxation, lightness, or a floating sensation. You might feel yourself growing larger, shrinking, or rising into the air. Beginners often get excited by such experiences. Don't worry—you won't actually take off. When you reach a state of relaxation, your nervous system simply begins letting sensory signals through more efficiently. A large amount of previously blocked sensory material can now flow freely, producing all sorts of odd feelings. It has no special meaning at all. It's just sensation, so use your ordinary technique. Watch it arise, then watch it pass. Don't get caught up in it.

Problem Four: Drowsiness

Feeling drowsy during meditation is perfectly normal. You become very calm and relaxed, which is exactly as it should be. Unfortunately, we usually only experience this pleasant state when falling asleep, so we associate it with that process. Naturally, you gradually drift off. When you notice yourself dozing, shift your mindfulness from the breath to the drowsiness itself. Drowsiness has certain qualities that affect your thinking. Identify them, and notice the corresponding sensations in the body. This curious awareness is drowsiness's natural opponent and will make it vanish. If that doesn't work, look into why your body is sleepy, find the cause, and address it. If you've just eaten a big meal, that might be it. It's best not to eat too much before sitting, or to wait an hour after a heavy meal. Also, don't overlook the obvious: if you've been hauling bricks all day, of course you'll be tired; the same goes if you slept only a few hours the night before. Pay attention to what your body needs before you sit. Don't give in to sleep. Stay awake and mindful, because sleep and meditative absorption are diametrically opposed. No fresh insight comes from sleep; it comes only from meditation. If you're very sleepy, take a deep breath and hold it as long as you can. Then slowly exhale. Take another deep breath, hold it as long as possible, and slowly exhale again. Repeat this until you feel warmed up and the sleepiness has gone, then return to the breath.

Problem Five: Inability to Concentrate

A restless, jumping mind is something everyone experiences, and we'll address it specifically in the two chapters on "Dealing with Distraction." But you should also be aware of certain external factors that contribute to this, and most can be adjusted with simple changes to your schedule. Mental images are powerful; they linger in the mind for a long time. All the techniques of storytelling work directly on this raw material. A good work, with its words and images, leaves a deep impression on the mind. If you've just watched an award-winning film, your meditation will be filled with those images; if you're reading a thriller, your meditation will be filled with monsters. So rearrange the order: meditate first, then read or watch a film.

Another powerful factor is your own emotional state. If there are conflicts in your life, unsettled feelings will follow you onto the cushion. Try to settle things before you sit, and your practice will flow more smoothly with less mental chatter. But don't use this as an excuse to skip meditating. Sometimes you can't resolve everything before sitting. Let it go and sit anyway. It's your own narrow view that traps you. Use meditation to let go of self-centered attitudes, and your problems will be easier to deal with later. Sometimes the mind seems unable to settle for no obvious reason. Recall the cycle we mentioned earlier—meditation is one link in it. You'll have good days and bad days.

Insight meditation is primarily a practice of awakening awareness. Emptying the mind is no more important than mindful awareness. If your mind is turbulent and won't settle, simply observe it. All of it is you, and by doing so you'll take another step forward on your journey of self-discovery. Most importantly, don't get frustrated by the mind's ceaseless chatter; that chatter is just another object for mindfulness to attend to.

Problem Six: Boredom

It's hard to imagine anything more boring than sitting still for an hour just feeling air move in and out of your nostrils. In meditation, you repeat this process over and over. Everyone experiences it. Boredom is a mental state—treat it as one. A few simple strategies can help you work with it:

Strategy One: Re-establish Authentic Mindfulness

If the breath has become a tedious exercise in repeated observation, one thing is certain: you're no longer observing it with authentic mindfulness. Mindfulness is never boring. If you find yourself bored, look again. Don't assume you know what the breath is. Don't take what you observe for granted. If you do, you're reducing the process to a concept and missing its living reality. When you maintain clear mindfulness of the breath or anything else, you'll never be bored. Mindfulness observes everything with the eyes of a child and with curiosity. It sees each moment as if it were the very first—and the only one. So look again.

Strategy Two: Observe Your State of Mind

Examine your boredom closely. What is it? Where is it? What does it feel like? What is it made of? Are there physical sensations with it? How does it affect your thinking? Examine boredom as if you've never experienced that state before.

Problem Seven: Fear

Fearful states sometimes arise inexplicably during meditation. This is common and can have many causes. It may stem from something suppressed long ago. Remember, thoughts bubble up from the unconscious. The emotional charge of a thought enters your awareness before the thought itself. If you endure the fear, the memory will only chatter at you within limits you can handle. Second, you may be facing our "fear of the unknown" directly. At some point in your practice, reality will hit you hard. You are dismantling the walls of illusion you've always used to explain life to yourself. You will come face to face with ultimate reality. It's terrifying, but you must face it eventually. Step forward and go deep.

The third possibility is that the fear you feel is self-created, perhaps the result of clumsy technique. You may have unconsciously set up a program to "check what's about to happen." So when a frightening fantasy appears, your concentration locks onto it, and the fantasy feeds on the energy of your focus and grows. The real problem here is that mindfulness is too weak. If mindfulness were strong enough, it would notice this transformation as soon as it began and handle the situation with equanimity. Whatever the source, mindfulness is the cure. Observe the fear just as it is. Don't cling to it. Just watch it arise and grow. Study its effects. See how it makes you feel and how it affects your body. When you find yourself falling into an abyss of terrifying fantasies, simply observe them with mindfulness. See images as images, memories as memories. Watch emotional reactions arise and know them as they are. Stand outside the process; don't get involved. Look upon all the changes as a curious bystander. More importantly, don't try to manipulate the situation. Don't try to suppress memories, feelings, or fantasies. Just step aside and let the whole turbulent state boil and dissipate on its own. It can't hurt you. It's only memory, only fantasy. It is nothing at all—just fear.

When fear is allowed to walk its own path across the stage of conscious awareness, it won't sink into the unconscious to come back and trouble you later. It will vanish forever.

Problem Eight: Unease

Restlessness is often a cover that appears in the unconscious of experienced practitioners. We humans are good at suppressing things rather than directly facing unpleasant experiences. We try to bury them so we don't have to deal with them. Unfortunately, we often don't succeed, or at least not completely. Although the thoughts are hidden, the mental energy used to cover them up remains and secretly erupts, producing the discomfort we call "unease" or "restlessness." Nothing stays successfully buried, yet you still can't feel at ease, still can't relax. When this uncomfortable state appears in meditation, just watch it. Don't let it control you. Don't get up and leave. Don't fight it or try to make it disappear. Let it be there and observe it closely. Then whatever has been suppressed will eventually surface, and you'll know what you were worried about.

The unpleasant experience you're trying to escape could be anything: guilt, greed, or some other problem. It could also be obvious pain, a hidden ailment, or a precursor of illness. Whatever it is, let it arise and observe it carefully. If you simply sit and observe your unease, it will eventually leave. Passing through the test of unease is a small breakthrough in your meditation life. It will teach you much. You will discover that unease is not just a superficial state of mind—it's impermanent by nature. It comes and goes and has no power to control you.

Problem Nine: Over-Efforting

You'll notice that skilled meditators are usually very joyful people. They possess one of humanity's most precious treasures: a sense of humor. Their humor isn't the shallow wit of talk show hosts—it's genuine humor. They can laugh at their own failures and poke fun at their personal misfortunes. Beginners often take the practice too seriously. Learning to stay light during meditation is important. When you sit, relax as much as you can. You must learn to observe everything that happens objectively. If you're tense, fighting, and treating everything very, very seriously, you'll only make things worse.

Beginners are often eager to see results. They're full of inflated expectations. They dive in headfirst and expect incredible results immediately. They push and strain, tense and exhausted, and everything becomes extremely stern and serious. This tension works against mindfulness. Their gains are naturally small, and then they conclude meditation is boring, can't meet their expectations, and they give it up. You should understand that you can only learn meditation by meditating. Only through direct, practical experience can you learn what meditation is and where it will take you. Beginners often don't know their direction, because they don't really know what the practice is; they just let their imagination run wild.

Beginners' expectations are, of course, unrealistic and uninformed. What they hope for is misguided; those expectations offer no benefit at all and only become obstacles. Over-efforting only brings rigidity and pain, leading to guilt and self-blame. When you practice with too much strain, your effort becomes wooden and kills mindfulness before it can even start. The best advice is to let go of everything—let go of your expectations and tension—and simply meditate with steady, balanced effort. Enjoy the practice; don't turn it into drudgery or a burden. Just maintain mindfulness, and the meditation will take care of what comes next.

Problem Ten: Frustration

The result of over-efforting is frustration. You're tense, and nothing gets done. You realize you haven't made the progress you expected, so you feel frustrated, like a failure. This is all a very natural cycle, but it is completely avoidable. Forcing yourself with unrealistic expectations is the main cause. Still, this symptom is everywhere. Even with the best advice, you'll find it still descends on you. There is a solution. If you find yourself feeling frustrated, simply observe your mental state clearly. Don't add to it; just watch it. The feeling of failure is just another impermanent emotional reaction. If you get involved, it will feed on your energy and grow. If you just stand aside and watch, it will pass.

If you notice failure and frustration during meditation, it's even easier to handle. You feel you cannot maintain mindfulness. At that moment, simply stay mindful of the feeling of failure itself. Through this simple step, you can re-establish your mindfulness. The feeling of failure is nothing but memory.

There is no such thing as failure in meditation, only setbacks and difficulties. Unless you give up completely, there's no failure at all. Even if you spent twenty whole years without any gain, you can still choose to maintain mindfulness at any moment. That is your decision. Regret only causes you to lose mindfulness and open another door. The moment you realize you've lost mindfulness, that very realization is itself an act of mindfulness. So continue the practice. Don't be led off course by emotional reactions.

Problem Eleven: Resisting Meditation

Sometimes you simply don't feel like meditating; the thought of it is annoying. Missing one session isn't a big deal, but it easily becomes a habit. It's best to push past the resistance as much as possible and continue sitting. Observe the aversion. In most cases it's brief—it flickers before your eyes, and after five minutes of sitting, it disappears. Other times it's caused by an emotional low that day, and this will last a bit longer. But it too will eventually pass. Resolving it during a twenty- or thirty-minute sit is better than carrying it with you and ruining your entire day. Resistance may also arise because the practice itself has hit some difficulty, which you may or may not be aware of. If you know the problem, use the techniques introduced in this book to address it; once the problem is solved, the resistance will disappear with it. If you don't know the problem, you have to tough it out. Just keep sitting until the resistance passes, and watch it carefully. It will vanish. Then the cause may surface when awareness awakens, and at that point you can begin to deal with it.

Your Attitude Is the Problem

If you frequently resist meditation, suspect that something is off with your basic attitude. It may be very subtle. Meditation is not a dreary ritual, nor a painful or boring chore. It is also not a strict and solemn obligation. Meditation is mindfulness, a new way of being, a form of play. Meditation is your friend; when you see it that way, resistance will vanish like light smoke brushed away by a summer breeze.

If you have tried everything possible and the resistance still remains, the problem may be more serious. Meditators sometimes encounter certain supernatural obstacles beyond the scope of this book. Beginners rarely encounter this, but it can happen. Don't give up; seek help. Find a qualified insight meditation teacher and ask them to help you resolve this issue. That's exactly what they're there for.

Problem Twelve: Trance or Dullness

We've already discussed the psychological phenomenon of drowsiness. Within that process there is a particular pathway you should pay special attention to: mental dullness can be a harmful byproduct of deep meditative absorption. As your relaxation deepens, not only do the muscles relax, neural transmission also changes. This creates a sensation of great calm and lightness in the body. You feel deeply at peace, as if detached from the body. This is a very comfortable state. At first, your concentration remains dutifully focused on the breath. But as it continues, the comfortable sensation takes over and shifts your attention away from the breath. You begin to truly enjoy this state, and your mindfulness begins to decline. Your attention drifts aimlessly through a hazy mist of bliss. The result is a state completely devoid of mindfulness, a trance-like rapture. The remedy is, of course, mindfulness. Observe these phenomena with mindfulness, and they will disappear. When feelings of bliss arise, accept them; there's no need to avoid them, but never get drunk on them. They are merely physical sensations; treat them as such. Observe sensations as sensations, dullness as dullness. Watch them arise, and watch them pass; don't get involved in them.

Problems will inevitably arise during meditation—everyone experiences them. You can view them as terrible torments or as challenges to be overcome. If you see them as burdens, you'll only add to your suffering. But if you see them as opportunities for learning and growth, the horizons of your mind will be infinitely open.