A good meditation instructor will tell you to meditate when you want to the least. It’s often accompanied by a little smile. I remember the first time pouring my pain out to a teacher and his response was would you like to go meditate? If I was being honest I would have said no my body feels like it's on fire, the last thing I want to do is sit and breathe. But it's exactly what I needed to do.
A great meditation instructor is a mix between a therapist and a drill sergeant. You explain the struggles you're having and they tell you to go sit in silence for the next 30 minutes. You start complaining and they offer you to meditate on it. You start crying and they hold space as you sit and let it go. It seems like no matter what your problem is, the answer is more meditation.
This used to be infuriating to me. I was a Type-A personality with a hundred checklists and dozens of goals. I wanted to DO something. I wanted to “SOLVE” something. The last thing I wanted to do when facing a problem was SIT there. I would challenge them to answer how sitting there was ever going to solve my problems. The best teachers would only grin.
It took me hundreds of hours of meditation to learn why my teachers had that little smile. It took ages to realize that sitting there would in fact solve all my problems. It was longer still before I realized that I could never solve my problems by doing anything. I finally concluded that no matter what I did, the only thing that solved any problems was meditation.
That is a tough pill to swallow. You can never solve the problem by doing something? How could that be? Everyone told us to “Just Do It'“ our whole lives. The advice of the modern day is to get out there and chase our dreams. Motivational speakers tell us to bulldoze through obstacles and "make things happen." So how could doing something never solve the problem?
That's a simple one, even if it's troublesome to accept. We don't have any problems; we only have a problem state of mind. When we see problems we sit within a mental state of fear and confusion. While we're in that state everything seems insurmountable. We see ourselves caught in a trap with no way out. So we lash out and try to do something, anything, to escape. But that doesn't solve the problem.
Because we don't have problems; we are the problem. We are the ones who have engineered this state. We are the ones who are stewing in anxiety, shame, and fear creating a soup so thick that we can’t see what to do. We are the ones imprisoned by beliefs that lead us to feel like a cornered animal. These are the only problems that we have.
Which is excellent news. If we have problems that exist in the outside world then we must go on a crusade to change the world to solve them. But if we are the problem, and we created the problem, then we can solve the problem. The struggle is that we can't solve them by doing something, no matter how hard we try.
In doing something, we pretend that the solution lies outside of ourselves. We assume that if we could only change the world (and keep it that way) then the problems would disappear. We're attempting to pave the world rather than making ourselves sandals. We waste our lives shaping the world to our liking only to realize that it will never solve the problems inside.
It's insane that we thought that it could. How could changing something on the outside ever solve a problem that's on the inside? As the famous zen saying goes, wherever you go there you are. That's why we meditate. To deal with the problem, you. Because you're the only problem you'll ever have. So... don't just do something, sit there.
P.S. I'm working on shorter and clearer articles so if you want part 2 of this, make sure to subscribe.
Hi! I’m David Longhini. Currently writing from Pumula South Africa learning to surf. But by the time this posts I’ll be on my way to Madagascar. I’m a pseudo-retired nomad who’s writing as he goes deeper into spirituality and finds his next calling. If this hit the mark, please reach out and engage. Send a message, comment, like, share, and of course Subscribe!
As a doctor, I have a problem with people saying, "You just have to be more resilient"
The main reasons healthcare professionals burn out and drop out is that their organizations don't respect them, and the sick care system chews them up. Healthcare professionals are some of the most resilient people in the workforce.
Hope you don't burn out in re-entry