Why you can't meditate
From Monk Mode
The mind is only a vehicle. When we don’t need our legs we don’t use them. Likewise, let the mind rest when not needed.
—Jean Klein, “Who Am I? The Sacred Quest”
This is the first in a three-part series about meditation and working with the mind, excerpted from my book Monk Mode.
- Why you can’t meditate
- Catching grace (coming soon)
- Getting nothing done (coming soon)
The mind is a lot, as perhaps you’ve noticed while owning one. It can be a rather exhausting place to live sometimes. No wonder, when there’s so much going on.
Is it possible to get a break from the mind and its endless, restless distractions? Could we dial it all back a little bit, and make some headspace for productive thinking? Or even give the mind a rest altogether while the body gets on with just being, for a change?
Maybe we could. It’s a struggle, though, especially at first, just because we’re so used to the mind rattling on at a million thoughts per second, every hour of the day and night. If you’ve ever had trouble getting to sleep because your mind won’t shut up, for example, you’ll know just what I’m talking about.
Quieting the mind is impossible
Many people, to help relieve this cranial indigestion, are drawn to practices such as meditation (enthusiastically promoted wherever self-help books and apps are sold). But meditation never quite seems to live up to the sales pitch, and most people try it once or twice and then move on, disappointed.
Let’s try to dig in to why that might be, and see if there’s something we can do about it.
I think if you asked most people what meditation is, they’d probably say something like “Quieting your mind”. Fine. Let’s try that, then. Experiment one. Sit down somewhere comfortable, put this book down, and just spend a minute or two attempting to quiet your mind. Then come back here (we’ll wait).
Did it work? Not at all, I suspect. In fact, the more you frantically concentrated and tried to force your mind to stop working, the less calm and centred you probably became. Irritating, isn’t it?
You tried meditation and failed, so you’re just one of those people who’s not good at meditation. It’s not for you. Oh well, there’s always crystal healing, or Zumba, or binaural beats. Right?
Well, yes. It’s true, you can’t meditate, but don’t feel too bad, because there’s a reason for that: no one can meditate.
Magical expectations
At least, no one can meditate in the way it’s typically sold to us: you assume the lotus position, close your eyes, and instantly become calm, happy, and relaxed. That’s just not a thing that happens.
Many people come to meditation with a kind of mystical, magical view. “If I sit down in the right posture, wearing the right clothes, with the right expression on my face, and in the right environment, something magical should happen in my mind.”
—Rob Nairn, “Diamond Mind: A Psychology of Meditation”
You can’t switch off your brain, and that’s probably just as well, since you’d die more or less instantly. But it feels like something we’d love to do, at least for a little while every day, and we all get quite frustrated at our apparent inability to do it.
An experiment
It’s actually quite interesting to observe what the mind does when we’re suddenly looking at it. Let’s try a slightly different experiment, then. Again, sit comfortably—so probably not in the lotus position, unless you’re unusually flexible. In a chair is fine.
Now, don’t try to be calm, to quiet your mind, or to think of nothing; we’ve established that’s physically impossible. Instead, just sit there and pay attention to whatever happens inside your head. If a thought pops up, what is it about? If you find yourself boarding a train of thought, where does it go?
You’re not trying to do anything, remember, just to notice what goes on. Whatever happens is okay, in this experiment: you can’t get this wrong. When you think it’s been one or two minutes, stop.
What was your interior monologue like? Mine usually goes something like this:
Hmm. This is boring. I’m hungry. Also, I should probably visit the bathroom soon. But not quite yet. I need to finish this meditation first. It doesn’t seem to be going very well. I must have been here ten minutes already and I’m not feeling remotely calm. Man, I suck at this. Concentrate! What is that buzzing noise? Is that a fly? Or is it just the fridge motor?
I wonder if the fridge is breaking down. How old even is that fridge, anyway? Maybe three, four years? It should last longer than that, shouldn’t it? What part of a fridge could even wear out, anyway? I guess… the compressor? Do fridges still have those? Some kind of motor, anyway. If it does go wrong, I hope it’s not when I’m on vacation.
Like that old bit of Michael McIntyre’s: “You go away for two weeks and you think your appliances will start to combust! So you unplug every single thing in your home. Everything except the fridge. We trust the fridge!”
Not always exactly like that, of course, but something along those lines. First, the mind rebels at the momentary lack of outside stimulation. Then, it starts to generate its own entertainment. Sounds, feelings, memories, physical sensations like itching or discomfort, act as the seeds around which the crystal grows. One thought triggers another, and very quickly I’m on a wild ride of free-association.
The mind adores its own fabrications
When it’s not dredging up old comedy bits, my mind likes to gnaw away at things that are worrying me about the future, or berating me about the past:
What’s going to happen about that email? I think I came across kind of rude. I hope that person doesn’t think I’m rude and angry. What if they send an angry reply? Maybe they’ve already replied. I should check my inbox. But then I’d get stressed. Or is it more stressful sitting here wondering whether that email is there or not, and not knowing?
Is it any wonder that we sometimes feel more agitated after a session of “meditation” than before it? Here’s part of what I think is going on. The million and one thoughts bouncing around inside the careenium are making a lot of noise, but most of the time we ruthlessly suppress it by being busy. “La la la! I can’t hear you!”
Talking, working, watching TV, listening to podcasts, driving, playing games, or just scrolling on our phones: more or less anything that engages the brain circuits seems good enough to keep the intrusive thoughts, worries, and random nonsense at bay—at least for a while.
In the end the mind adores its own fabrications.
—Jean Klein, “Who Am I? The Sacred Quest”
You cannot stop thoughts
If we turn off all that incoming information for a minute, though, we’re abruptly exposed to the din that’s going on inside our heads. It was always there, but we were just studiously avoiding paying attention to it.
For a random thought in the careenium, though, used to feeling neglected and ignored among the chaos, this is a rare and precious opportunity. All of a sudden, it has our attention! Time to shout even louder. Maybe this time it’ll cut through.
As a careenium owner, this is highly disconcerting. It’s like trying to have a dozen conversations all at once, each with someone suffering badly from attention deficit disorder. Not a pleasant experience, and of course it’s most people’s first experience of anything like meditation.
When we meditate we inevitably make assumptions about what we should be able to do. One assumption we may make is that we should be able to “clear the mind,” because we have read this dreadful phrase in books.
You won’t believe the number of times I’ve said to groups of people, “When you meditate you can’t clear your mind, you cannot stop thoughts, you cannot get rid of emotions,” and within ten minutes somebody will say “When I started meditating, I couldn’t get rid of these thoughts that kept coming back to me.”
—Rob Nairn, “Diamond Mind: A Psychology of Meditation”
Calming? Far from it. Better reach for your phone and load up some more distractions. As long as we keep gently tickling the surface of the mind, giving it enough input to maintain a constant level of mild stimulation, it won’t turn round and bite us. We hope.
In the next post, we’ll talk about how to abandon the unhelpful “end-gaining” mindset that’s often associated with meditation, and instead relax, stop struggling, and let the grass grow by itself. If you can’t wait, check out the book.
