Sometimes when we sit meditation, we feel a discomfort that might initially seem like a sign that something is wrong. This feeling can be intense – we can say to ourselves, “I feel like I’m going to explode. Nothing actually hurts, but am not sure I can stand this one second longer”. A challenging feeling like this might seem distressing, but it is actually often a sign that our most valuable inner work is being done.
A metaphor: a prospector might find a raw ingot of gold that needs the other metals alloyed with it removed before selling it. The way to do that is to subject the chunk to intense heat until it melts, and only then can one scoop off the copper, iron, lead, zinc, and other impurities that had been mixed up with the pure gold.
A central axiom to understand about mindfulness meditation practice is that it often has us feel worse before we feel better. And, of course, our natural instinct as a heat increases is to move away from the flame. While doing that is smart is daily life, in meditation, backing off can be a obstacle to positive transformation. If a nugget of ore is heated to just below the melting point, again and again, and then allowed to cool off, we will never get pure gold. Only sustained heat past the point of discomfort gets us what we want.
Another central axiom of mindfulness meditation practice is that our unhappiness in life is basically sourced by mental friction inside our psyche more than what happens in the world around us, and that, with persistent effort, we can work this viscosity out. We have these impurities woven into our minds, like the iron, lead, and other metals with the gold.
So, when we start heating up with discomfort in a meditation session, the sitting is not creating the difficulty – it is simply bringing to the surface the tangled energy that was already deep in there. And, at the surface is precisely where our mental poisons need to be in order for us to mindfully watch them out of ourselves. So, we can celebrate when we get to that place of “I feel like I am going to explode”. This is finally when we have a clear clean shot on goal, and can face our usually-buried inner tangles, so that we can feel freer, bigger, deeper, and brighter afterwards.
Trying to intentionally get us to this place is one reason behind the suggestion that one uncomfortably long sitting of half an hour is more useful than two sittings of fifteen minutes, or to intentional meditate in a situation that brings out an emotional reaction in us. In general, though, we can pursue a strategy of simply facing discomfort when it arises naturally – we don’t need to seek it out or create it.
Meditation practice often asks us to turn around our ordinary relationship to discomfort, and to stop treating the arising of difficulty as a signal to retreat. With experience, we can come to see that what we most want to avoid in meditation is often what most needs our attention, what seems like the wrong thing to be experiencing is often exactly the right thing, and what feels like meditation failing is often the meditation working. A chunk of ore, if it could feel, would probably not enjoy the furnace. But the gold inside it, if it could speak, would say – this is what I was waiting for.