With my next 6 week ‘Learn to Meditate’ course having just started, I have been thinking once again about how best to encourage the development of a regular home meditation practice. As with the development of any new skill, a commitment to regular practice is essential. I am, however, all too aware of the potential for meditation to become yet another thing we can use to beat ourselves up with if we’re not practising as regularly as we’d like or think we ‘should’.
If you miss a day, a week, a month or longer it is so important to practice self-compassion by being gentle with yourself about what you haven’t done and simply picking up where you left off without punishing yourself. At the same time, however, it is good to be alert to how easy it is to keep putting something off the longer you leave it. Self-compassion involves a balance between being gentle with yourself and not letting yourself too easily off the hook.
This balance is, I think, a little like the balance required during the practice of meditation itself. That is, the balance between focusing so intently during meditation that you don’t relax (and possibly even give yourself a headache!) and relaxing to the point of falling asleep*. As Sogyal Rinpoche says in the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying “there has to be a delicate balance between relaxation and alertness”. Just as the strings on a musical instrument require just the right amount of tension – they can’t be too taut or too loose – the same applies to our mind during meditation as well as to our regular practice.
Then, of course, there is the danger that achieving perfect balance becomes something else we tie ourselves in knots to get right (where does it end?) which is why, I think, it is more helpful to think of balance as a guide; something to work towards but around which you are content to oscillate.
*Nb. having said this, feeling sleepy and nodding off is common when learning to meditate and this isn’t a bad thing as it means you are relaxing. Remaining alert while relaxed is something that comes with practice.
