When does meditation start to feel good?
Upon beginning meditation, you will likely find the actual meditation sittings to feel like a fucking disaster. I think I've been pretty up front about that part. When I first began practicing, not only would my thoughts be a whirlwind but also intense heat and anger would boil up in my body.
For beginners, the benefits of meditation will likely be first noted in their daily lives. They will feel more themselves, more at ease. You become more prone to being moved or inspired--emotionally, intellectually, and spirituality.
But the actual act of sitting and meditating will for the most part either feel boring, agonizing, confusing, or triggering. Now and then there may be random sessions or moments in which the clouds part and the sun of awareness suddenly shines. That's nice too. But the point is to just sit and do the practice.
One of the first obstacles of the beginning practice stages is to learn to refrain from clinging to pleasant moments or avoiding unpleasant ones during a session. This is actually how a sense of peace develops. You become divinely Unbothered.
However, it is true that the actual practice of sitting and meditating for more seasoned practitioners will for the most part feel pretty good.
When does that transition happen and, more importantly, why does it happen?
The typical conception we have of using concentration is that we are spending energy to force ourselves to hone in on something. It is almost like a squeezing of consciousness.
This is because our minds are typically a zoo of random shit.
So when instructed to focus your attention in the form of a meditation technique, it starts out as you might imagine. You are spending energy to refrain from wandering off down trains of thought. And when you do wander down a train of thought, you spend energy to bring your focus back to the meditation.
Then with practice, your concentration takes on a different quality.
The notion that concentration requires energy expenditure is based on the experience that the mind's attention is being pulled in so many directions. But once you start to overcome the unconscious tendency to leap from thought to thought, you discover something new about concentration.
Through meditation practice, concentration is created simply by not wandering off.
You were once unconsciously spending lots of energy jumping from thought to thought. You didn't consciously realize how the compulsive non-stop activity of the mind actually drains your resources.
To overcome that momentum, effort needs to be applied. More energy needed to be spent in the form of focus or concentration.
Eventually a shift happens when that unconscious expenditure is outweighed by your concentration.
That's when it becomes easier to remain present, focused, and relaxed rather than wandering down various trains of thought.
There is sometimes debate between spiritual philosophies about the role of effort and effortlessness in spiritual practice. In this instance, effort is needed until effort becomes irrelevant, but that's another matter.
The state of concentration, when relaxed and relatively effortless, is immensely pleasurable.
Think about how it requires no effort to focus on something you're super into, like binging a TV series or getting into a game. And how that feels pretty good!
But that good feeling is limited in several ways. It's limited by the duration of the activity. It's limited by the duration of your attention (if you're doomscrolling while watching). And it's limited by how good/fun you perceive that activity to be.
Meditation has no such limits. What you start to experience is Peace.
Such peace isn't just calm and lovely. There is a tasty quality to it. It is the undifferentiated happiness reflected, albeit dimly, in all of the forms of happiness you have ever experienced.
Keep all of this in mind when I talk about the challenges of meditation practice. Although I am often addressing and helping people with the beginner's experience, this aspect of meditation practice is less often discussed.
While every meditation session is exactly what you needed and even the most advanced practitioners may have hellish sittings, with time and dedication, meditation overall becomes a fulfilling, enriching, transformative, and yes even pleasant experience unlike any other.
