So You Want to Learn Meditation, Do You? Okay…Think About This:

• • You will have to feel your feelings. All that anxiety, anger, shame, and fear you’ve been trying to suppress by eating, Facebook, work, TV, being “busy” or getting high just might hit you with its full force. This is not a practice of rainbows and flowers, you know. Ugly, uncomfortable feelings are trying to talk to you, and if you meditate, you give them a chance. Why direct your awareness inward when you can just ignore them? That’s the American way!
  • You will end up getting to know your own mind? The little bit that I’ve seen so far convinces me it’s time to get to know someone else’s! Do you really want to go in there alone? Let’s just leave stuff like that to the scientists and psychiatrists…they’re the experts! When I spend time looking at my mind sometimes it totally freaks me out. Forget it!
  • You won’t be able to run from yourself. Meditation is like a mirror. It reflects you to yourself. It can help you accept yourself as you are, without judgment. But if you’re not ready to get intimate with your own motivations, drives, fears, desires, obsessions, fantasies, etc., meditation is going to be a REAL turn-off.
  • Be careful; it will make you more conscious. Becoming more conscious doesn’t always feel good. And meditation makes you more conscious. If you prefer to react to the world like an emotional gunslinger, shooting from the hip and blissfully unaware of your motivations, you should NOT start meditating. Seriously, it can get pretty uncomfortable because you will be more responsible for your actions.
  • You might feel compassion for others. After all, isn’t it more convenient to just focus on yourself all the time and ignore how others are feeling – what kind of suffering they are going through? The next thing you know you will be doing Metta practice for people you do not even know, or worse yet, people who you find annoying and unpleasant. You might end up seeing other people’s point of view….UGH!
  • You will lose the ability to lie to yourself. If you practice feeling what you feel, your mastery for self-deception will start to fail. It gets harder to convince yourself that an obviously dysfunctional relationship is going to work, or that you really do like your job, or that it’s okay to keep letting your boss talk down to you. You might even have to do something about it. You might have to give up being a door mat. Being honest with yourself might require that you make some changes in how you look at your life and how you interact with others.
  • Your ability to lie to others will weaken. Admitting to yourself what you really feel makes it that much harder to deceive others. You could get incredibly vulnerable, and it will show. You might have to tell someone you love them. Or that you need help. Or cry in public. You may find it inconvenient since deception is such a useful tool for manipulation and exploitation.
  • Maybe too “old school”?. How can something that people have done for thousands of years have any relevance now?  There are so many more updated and easier, actually instant solutions to enlightenment. Why spend all that time doing something that is clearly outdated and passe? So many discoveries have been made in the few thousand years. Didn’t they think the earth was flat back then?
  • You won’t be able to keep worrying obsessively. Meditation opens the door to inner peace. So if you are the kind of person who likes to worry and fret over every last thing, don’t ever start meditating. You’ll be disappointed.
  • It will take away all your excuses for being unhappy. Do you like being unhappy? If you do, never meditate. Meditation is a serious mood enhancer and it brightens everything. But if you don’t want to give up your rationale and justifications for being unhappy, you should abandon your meditation aspirations right away. And being happy takes away an excuse for others to feel sorry for you, and for you to spend time on your pity pot.
  • In short, it will deprive you of almost everything you have been clinging to. You’ll be left with silence, stillness, and perhaps the overwhelming conviction that you don’t need anything outside your little old self to be completely full and happy.

So Now You Know the Risks