cultivating your bliss: how to avoid making yourself miserable in meditation

When you are meditating and your brain is thinking of your next appointments and choreographing the day and night, what is going on?

Your brain and body are synchronizing the dance of it all, feeling the pulse of time, the beat of your heart and the beat of the day. If you allow this you will notice that there is a bliss of being in synch with the rhythm of your day.

When you develop a style of meditating that suits your individual mature, your body gives you a feedback signal which is a quiet current of bliss which you can feel underneath the noise of your brain sorting through its to-do list.

When you have rest time, you should be thinking about what you are going to make for dinner or whatever you are preparing for visualize what you are going to do before you do it, for this is a form of inner choreography.

If you look at it structurally, your body is practicing being relaxed for when it will be doing that activity. Your daily activity comes to you so naturally that living, doing and achieving becomes your daily yoga which is coded with some relaxation.

I have been teaching meditation since 1968. I try to be accommodating to all the different types of people there are. You may not like my approach, which emphasizes healthiness. In case you want to make meditation complicated and fail at it, here is a handy guide.

- Sit in uncomfortable postures. Especially, try to sit in the Lotus pose.

- Meditate longer than you want to or need to.

- Resist thoughts. Demand a blank mind.

- Resist falling asleep, no matter how tired you are.

- Sit in a stuffy room.

- If you are a woman, study meditation with men who fear women.

- Choose a tradition or meditation that reminds you of the worst aspects of your childhood.

- Try to block out your inner voices.

- Worry about whether you are being a good meditator.

- Suppress your emotions.

- Use a mantra that grates on your nerves.

- Worry about whether your chakras are balanced or not.

- Resent all noises and sounds you hear.

- Wear new, uncomfortable contacts while meditating.

- Ban specific types of thoughts - such as sexual thoughts or angry thoughts.

In case I didn't list the perfect Odious Rule for you, just make one up - anything that totally goes against your grain or damages your joints is OK. If you are sitting in a group of ten people for a meditation class and the instruction is given, "OK, let's all close our eyes and find something about our breathing to enjoy," maybe five to seven people will find something to enjoy. One person will sit there sort of perplexed, not knowing where to begin.

A couple of people will be sitting there scowling. If you ask one of the scowlers what he is doing, he might say, "I was trying to block out noise." Inquiring further, you would find that he was starting to become aware of his breath, then he heard a sound somewhere, then he briefly wondered what the sound was, then he invented an Odious Rule on the spot that he should not hear the sound, then he got angry (or else he was recalling an internalized, angry parental voice) then, disgusted, he returned to his breath. This all took place in five or ten seconds. This guy or gal is not going to have a happy time in meditation. His critical inner voice will win every time. Not only that, but it will get to score a hit on him by proving that he failed at meditation.

free yourself from odious meditation rules

Be alert when you are starting to make up an Odious Rule, and start making fun of it. The rules can vary from person to person. For one person it may be "You have to make your mind blank," and for another it might be, "You have to believe in the teacher," or "You're not allowed to feel too happy," or "Mood swings must be controlled." Sometimes it is just the voice of the Inner Rebel that must be banned, and obliterated with the drone of the mantra.

One way of finding out if you are being run by an Odious Rule you have going is to notice whatever you call "difficult." If you have any feeling of difficulty at any time during meditation, check in with what rules you have made up. When people say meditation is "difficult" and I ask them to describe in detail what is going on, often one or more of these is going on:

- Many thoughts are coming and everyone knows you aren't supposed to think during meditation.

- Some thoughts flash through very rapidly and everyone knows thoughts should obey the "thought speed limit" and move slowly, gracefully, with immense decorum, like a funeral procession.

- Sensations in the body are calling your attention and everyone knows that the body is supposed to be numb during meditation.

- Tension is being released -- the body is going into relaxation and by contrast the tense areas show up -- and everyone knows that tension is supposed to instantly disappear, like kitchen stains vanishing in TV commercials.

- Emotions are welling up and you don't want to feel them. Everyone knows you're not allowed to cry during meditation. Or else, "unauthorized" emotions are coming up. This is different for everyone.

What you may be encountering here is your internal manual of meditation. It already knows everything there is to know about everything. Its title is "How to Make Yourself Miserable" or "Meditation Made Difficult." As you pay attention in an easy way, this contradicts the inner programming about making things difficult.

This tendency is just in the culture. Not everyone has to deal with it right away. All meditators have to deal with it eventually. If the "Made Difficult" instruction set comes up and wants to take over your meditation, just make fun of it. Don't get into a struggle with the tendency to make things difficult. It's a tar baby.

When you approach the activity of meditating in a healthy way, you violate all the dysfunctional rules you may have learned along the way: don't feel, don't think, don't wiggle, don't ask questions, don't be angry, don't be sexual, don't doubt, don't be a rebel, don't do it your own way, do it the official way.

You never find bliss by violating the integrity of your emotions and thoughts. You can't insult your body, your mind or your emotions. When I am accepting all that I am in life, I feel a bliss underneath that doesn't depend on where I am in my life story. I can be in the midst of challenges, I can be on a long dry road but underneath I will feel bliss because there is a blissful quality to expanded awareness.

I invite you to fine tune your meditation practice to fit your daily life. You meditate right for your body type and your mind type. Some people like to meditate when they are moving. Some people can dance or walk. The hardest part of meditation feels like cleaning out a closet, for you feel all these old thoughts and release control. Your body goes into a rest that's deeper than sleep. This is physiologically true and has been documented by researchers for decades at Harvard Medical School and elsewhere.

When the body rests that way, it's a kind of dreaming that your brain does. I call it conscious dreaming. This is sometimes blissful, to experience all this unprocessed emotional content. Feeling this makes you feel the story of your life. It is just like dreams, and this kind of meditation makes you feel the bliss of being in rhythm with who you are-- instead of making yourself miserable.

Editor's note: Based in Los Angeles, Dr. Roche (www.lorinroche.com) earned his Ph.D. from the University of California at Irvine. His thesis concerned the language meditators use to describe their experiences. In other words, the narratives or maps they construct to describe their inner worlds. His Master's Degree work focused on the hazards of meditation and the crisis points in a meditator's development.

In 1975 Dr. Roche stopped teaching the Transcendental Meditation Technique and started developing an approach, which he calls Instinctive Meditation, that works with the fine structure of individual uniqueness, rather than imposing a standardized, one-size-fits-all approach. He draws on insights into how people learn gained from the best of Western science and Eastern Yoga. This integrative approach results in straightforward ways for people to learn many different meditation techniques. With his wife, Camille Maurine, Lorin is the author of Meditation Secrets for Women and Meditation 24/7: Practices to Enlighten Every Moment of the Day. He is also the author of "Meditation Made Easy," "Breath Taking," "Whole Body Meditations," and The Radiance Sutras.