A Million Thoughts: Learn All About Meditation from a Himalayan Mystic

Just like an animal as large as an elephant, can obstruct your vision when in front of you, laziness of the mind obstructs your path of bliss and oneness. Think of the hibernating python or the one in deep slumber. It is still, calm but that does not equate to meditation. If you are lazy or restless, however still you may be sitting, it is not meditation. A meditation full of flaws is like a pot full of holes; just like the latter is unable to carry water, the former is unable to retain bliss.

What Causes Laziness in Meditation?

Imagine you are trying to move a big rock. You keep exerting your force. It is only natural that after a while you are going to feel exhausted and tired. Exactly the same thing happens with your mind. When you try hard to concentrate, and keep doing so even when you feel restless, there comes a time when you feel worn out and tired. If you are not attentive at that time, you will slip into stupor at that very moment. Such dullness compromises your meditation.

In every likelihood, presuming you are physically fit, you will experience restlessness before feeling lazy. If you can take corrective measures at the time of restlessness, it becomes relatively easy to overcome laziness. Like an athlete who gradually builds his endurance, his physical strength raising his pain barrier, a good meditator steadily increases the duration of his meditation. At the peak of my own meditation practice, I used to meditate for a straight stretch of ten hours. It was not easy, but the results were astounding. I did not start sitting ten hours from day one, in fact, I started with multiple one hour sessions gradually increasing them over the course of many years.

The Remedy

The moment you realize you are losing sharpness of your meditation, you need to exert mentally. You must refresh your concentration, recalibrate your focus. If your laziness has resulted from physical exhaustion, you need to stop meditating.

That can happen, if your meditation sessions are longer than 90 minutes each, or if you had a particularly stressful and tiring day. Under such circumstances, you should take a break, get up and inhale some fresh air, drink a little bit of water, walk around a bit and resume your session.

If you experience dullness as a result of mental exhaustion, something that can happen even after the first 20 minutes of your meditation, you must not get up and break your session. Instead, try to visualize a bright light, or focus on the enchanting aspects of your object of meditation while staying in the same posture. Refresh and energize yourself without getting up or ending your meditation. Shift your attention elsewhere for the time being but do not engage in thoughts that are not linked to your meditation. As you feel fresh again, relax and resume your original meditation. You need not exert any longer. Let the mind stay in its natural state. If you keep exerting, you will feel restless.

Balance is crucial. When you feel restless, relax; and, when you feel lazy, exert, concentrate. Restlessness and dullness repeatedly interfere with your meditation. They almost take turns. You need alertness to identify and correct both flaws. Hold short but lucid sessions and gradually increase the duration. Learn to meditate flawlessly for short periods first. When you learn to harness laziness and check restlessness, you are bound to make remarkable progress on the path of meditation.

Stray Thoughts

Even though I’ve used the term stray thoughts, the truth is that in meditation any thought that is not the one you are meditating on is a stray thought. It is one of the chief blocks and the hardest to overcome. All meditators, when they sit down and meditate, are bombarded by thoughts from all directions.

Thoughts are inseparable from the mind just like heat from fire. The act of concentration requires you to make a conscious and exerting effort to focus only on the desired thought. The art of meditation is to be able to hold that thought with perfect ease, without any undue exertion, with a sharp and still mind free of dullness and stupor. An adept is able to hold his session of meditation for as long he wants whereas an aspirant is able to meditate under favourable circumstances only, such as, pleasant surroundings, calm mind, no major stress, good physical health and so forth. Stray thoughts act like rocks thrown in a still lake.