Episode 178 – Why Is Meditation So Hard

Today I’d like to explore this question: Why is meditation so difficult?  •  meditation can be as simple as this Zen instruction: “Sit down, shut up, pay attention. Repeat.”  •  my teacher once said that to meditate, all you have to do is be spacious and not wait for anything  •   anyone should be capable of doing that; so why is it so hard?  •  partly it’s hard to do anything with consistency and follow through  •  but it’s even harder to stick with doing nothing, just sitting, observing, paying attention. Why is that so?  •  Trungpa Rinpoche talked quite a bit about comfort mind and entertainment mind  •  it’s as if we have some kind of ongoing project under the surface, a project that prevents us from actually looking too deeply into our experience  •  we keep churning things up to distract us from looking honestly, truly, and straight at our direct experience  •  it’s like that phrase, TMI — too much information; we actually don’t want to know that much about ourselves and who we are and what’s going on; we don’t really want to see beyond our story, our assumptions, our habits  •  it’s like we’re trapped in a book that we ourselves are writing  •  gently dismantling this process comes simply by sitting still, by letting in of a touch of freedom and a bit of fresh air  •  wisdom lives in undefined, open space; resting in that space allows wisdom to be found.