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

When you meditate, especially if your meditation is part of a solitary retreat, everything you have enjoyed in your past comes back to you. It is distracting. You feel tempted to go back in the world and start living a life of material enjoyment again, you feel restless during your meditation. You miss your pleasures, interactions and lifestyle. Solitude and meditation can become depressing at that time. They start to gnaw you like mouse at a rope. The easiest way of clearing hindrances posed by past memories or desires of enjoyment is to simply stay focused. Allow them to pass. Ultimately, they all are thoughts. If you don’t hanker after them, they will leave you so you can stay firmly established in your meditation and your meditative state.

Shiva Samhita, an ancient yogic text, lists the following hurdles of gratification.

Women, beds, seats, dresses, and riches are obstacles to Yoga. Betels, dainty dishes, carriages, kingdoms, lordliness and powers; gold, silver, as well as copper, gems, aloe wood, and kine; the Vedas and Sastras; dancing, singing and ornaments; harp, flute and drum; riding on elephants and horses; wives and children, worldly enjoyments; all these are so many impediments. These are the obstacles which arise from bhoga (enjoyment).54

This list does not mean that a practitioner can never enjoy his or life. On the contrary, life must be lived to the fullest. Nor must this list be taken literally. What it does mean though is that someone who is at the beginning stage of his journey should keep his life as simple as possible. This reduces the number of distractions. As it is, meditation isn’t exactly a walk in the park. Once you have reached a certain stage in your practice, these hurdles will cease to be obstacles on the path. They don’t distract or affect an adept any more than a jasmine bud would hurt an elephant.

Hurdles of Religion

Often I meet people who are reluctant to adopt good practices just because they belong to a different religion. This is one of the hardest hurdles to overcome. From the moment we are born, we are fed with religious information in one way or the other. We form our concepts around God, realization, the nature of this world, good or bad, right and wrong, moral and immoral based on what our religion tells us.

A good meditator puts his religious practices on hold during the intense practice of meditation. Most religions recommend certain actions to be pleasing to God or a ticket to heaven and they also label many acts as sins. Meditation is not one of them. It is not done to gain a place in heaven or to acquire any religious merit. The sole purpose is to wipe your mind clean of its inherent tendencies so you may write a new story. Anything that conditions the mind will eventually become a distraction in meditation. From that perspective, religion is but a hindrance for a serious meditator.

The following are the obstacles which dharma interposes: ablutions, worship of deities, observing the sacred days of the moon, fire sacrifice, hankering after vows and penances, fasts, religious observances, silence, the ascetic practices, contemplation and the object of contemplation, and alms- giving, world-wide fame, excavating and endowing of tanks, wells, ponds, convents and groves: sacrifices, vows of starvation, Chandrayana, and pilgrimages.55

Meditation in its purest sense has absolutely no connection with any religion. It does not insist in following any book, belief or God. As I wrote earlier, any thought (other than what you are meditating on), any emotion, any belief is simply a distraction. Sometimes, often in fact, our knowledge becomes a hurdle too.

Hurdles of Knowledge

Arjuna questioned Krishna on the battlefield saying that war was not the way to go and that it would result in bloodshed. Krishna, in reply, said:

yadātemoha-kalilaḿbuddhirvyatitariṣyati,

tadāgantāsinirvedaḿśrotavyasyaśrutasya ca.56

Your intelligence is lost in the forest of delusion, Arjuna. You’ve read too many books and heard too many sermons. Your knowledge is not your own. You will only realize the truth when you get past second-hand knowledge.

When we let our mind rest in its most natural state, the stream of primal consciousness flows unimpeded. Until then, all knowledge acquired from secondary sources remains a hurdle.

Now I shall describe, O Parvati, the obstacles which arise from knowledge. Sitting in the Gomukh posture and practising Dhauti (washing the intestines by Hatha Yoga). Knowledge of the distribution of the nadis (the vessels of the human body), learning of pratyahara (subjugation of the senses), trying to awaken the kundalini force, by moving quickly the belly (a process of Hatha Yoga), entering into the path of the senses, and knowledge of the action of the Nadis; these are the obstacles.57