Why the Resistance to Meditation?

Every spiritual teacher, from the IChing to living masters whose wisdom I have imbibed have counseled meditation. Those words always felt like an admonishment. When I began meditating on a daily basis it was with the help of the Vessels of Peace meditation circle. Over the years a meditative practice developed that I depended on. What I didn’t understand and questioned was the resistance to meditating that would show up, sometimes for months at a time, when it was time to meditate.

A string of events has brought what feels like an answer to my inquiry about some of the resistance. As I stood in a circle of locals gathered in front of the village store, I realized something had shifted in me. When a moment of silence descended on the conversation I remained silent and comfortable. For most of my life when a silence would open up, whether between two or twenty people, I would step into clown or entertainer mode to hide/deal with my anxiety. That ordinary moment became extraordinary, if only for me, when I noticed how comfortable I was with that silence.

This year I have been examining the discomfort and fear about being in silence myself, as well as in the company of quiet people. Today a window into the past opened as I wondered that took me back to childhood…where else? I was coming into the house after school. It was quiet, eerily so, and that quiet often meant an angry explosion was fermenting. I went into an eight year olds idea of crisis management and started being silly trying to get Mom to laugh. It worked once and a belief and habit for life was formed. That wasn’t the end or beginning of the forming of fear around silence, not by a long shot. I heard those lethal words, “be quiet”, ”sit still”, “shut up”, “children are meant to be seen and not heard”, and more all echoing down the timeline at once until I was the adult and they were coming out of my mouth. I remembered feeling sullen silence used as a weapon, a bad vibe between Mom and Dad. It is no wonder I felt I was being admonished when I was counseled to sit in silence and meditate. That statement was a trigger and the child in me would feel she was being told to go sit in the corner and be quiet and think about what she’d done. Silence as a punishment.

Last evening, after many concentrated hours of light body work I found myself energetically depleted. Options passed through my mind, go for a walk, take a hot tub, curl up with a book. It was my body that took me to my meditation spot. I followed, resistance free and loving it and returned with a sense of having been nourished and loved in the only way that truly serves, by myself the Mother.

May your New Moon intentions ride the waves of manifestation through this moon cycle!