The practice of mindfulness meditation holds the promise of many helpful benefits. Over time, it can boost positive moods like ease, joy, relaxation, peace, and well-being. Meditating can increase levels of energy and vigor, and it can create an open, bubbling, pleasantly vital flow of energy in the body. It can sharpen thinking and deepen concentration, improve the restfulness of our sleep, and increase confidence and self-esteem. And meditating itself sometimes feels terrific, like bliss, in the zone and in the flow, flying along effortlessly.
On any given day, though, when we sit down to meditate, it may also feel terrible – uncomfortable, repetitive, frustrating, effortful, agitating, boring, and/or painful. Sometimes, when we meditate, we feel even worse than during the rest of our day. Why would this be, for an activity that promises more happiness?
The answer is that meditation is “just being ourselves, except more so,” and sometimes being ourselves, being human, is challenging. Besides what may be happening in our lives today, when we meditate, things that are incomplete or uncomfortable for us from our past, and have gotten stuffed down into the subconscious, may bubble to the surface. And that tangled up mental energy rising up can be from something that happened last night, last month, a year ago, ten years ago, or from our childhoods.
These inner tangles arise because meditation is an opportunity actually resolve our long-standing inner conflicts. We can feel uncomfortable, however, while that process is happening.
An analogy is, the water in a washing machine gets dirty as clothes inside get cleaner, but that is a good sign that the process is working. In this metaphor, of course, the dirt is our impurities of mind and past, the clothes are our psyches, and cleaning power of the water and soap represents cultivating awareness, mindfulness, equanimity, and allowingness.
Similarly – to walk from a hill to the height of a tall mountain in the distance, some times we need to walk through a dark valley in between.
Most of us know how to heal a cut –keep it clean, and leave it alone. Our conscious mind may not know anything about hemoglobin, cell walls, or anything else biological, but our bodies know, and that is ultimately all we need. Similarly, as our psyches heal themselves through meditation, and things sometimes get uncomfortable while they do, we don’t have to understand all of what is happening, we just need to keep things clean and leave them alone.
In the end, the growth in positive mental states that we get from regularly meditating slowly rises over the years. It may or may not happen on a specific day, however, depending on what process our mind is going through. It’s like how, on any given day, the stock market may have lower valuation than it did the day before, sometimes dramatically lower, but, overall, the trend line rises over time – it has risen over 100x in the last seventy years.