Obstacles in meditation are not a problem, they are the path to finding freedom amidst it all. – Jack Kornfield
No matter what form of meditation we practice, sooner or later inner obstacles will arise. They arise naturally when we stop our busy lives and bring attention to our inner experience. On first becoming quiet we will can encounter the unfinished business we carry. There may be untended longings, unacknowledged grief, unrequited hopes, unexpressed love or our underlying fears and hurts. And as we get quieter still we can find ourselves facing the mystery of our own mortality, of death. In all spiritual traditions as attention is given to these problems, our understanding and compassion deepens, for it is through these that the path often unfolds. As my teacher Ajahn Chah used to say, “Where do you learn the most, when times are easy or when times are hard?”
In the Christian mystical tradition, The Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross talks about the periods of loneliness, fear, and doubt that one goes through after the initial awakenings into the light. Evagrius, a fourth-century Christian monk who lived in the Egyptian desert with the Christian Desert Fathers wrote a text describing the demons that come to people who go into the desert to undertake a meditation practice. These include the demons of pride, the demons of fear, the demons of lust, the noonday demon of laziness and so forth. In Zen, there are descriptions of further kinds of obstacles that arise in intense meditation. Practitioners might experience makyo. These are hallucinations involving vision, hearing, smell, or other senses.
How does one understand and work with these difficulties? Buddhist teachings say begin right where you are, with the most common hindrances such as physical pain and restlessness, anger, doubt and fear. Instead of resisting or trying to get rid of them, which usually keeps them stuck, you can name and acknowledge them kindly and surround them with mindfulness and compassion. Make space for them and soften around them. Breathe and become a loving witness. Invite them to open and show you their dance. As you let them open without resistance, they soften or disperse or transform into other energies. But not always. Sometimes they become quite intense for a time, but without resistance and a patient curiosity they will eventually change. They always do. And with this practice you learn a deep trust. You find that awareness can hold it all. You become the spacious awareness itself. Then as meditation deepens beyond the everyday level, even the more extreme, delightful or terrifying energies, visions, mental states, and difficulties become workable.
To find freedom requires a steadying of the heart, a trust in attention, a willingness to be present for it all. Like the sign in a Las Vegas casino that says, “You must be present to win”, the very obstacles that arise become your place to awaken.
This is an excerpt from ‘Bringing Home the Dharma: Awakening Right Where You Are‘
