If we are being honest, as I sat cross-legged on the cushion for my first meditation session, I was overcome with discomfort. My hips became stiff, my knees ached, my back tensed up, and my chest felt like it was fighting my efforts to breathe. Normally if I was experiencing this discomfort, I would simply shift my body into a different position until it was relieved. This time, however, I couldn’t, and I was forced to sit there with it as I listened to the instructor talk about pain and suffering and sitting with discomfort.
This semester I have been taking a class on Buddhist Philosophy, so it has been insightful to engage in mediation alongside it, because the two inform each other and increase my understanding of both. In both my class and mediation sessions, we have discussed the ‘dart sutra.’ A sutra is a Buddhist text. When experiencing pain or discomfort, our natural reaction is often to aggressively wish it away, to long for a time when we no longer feel it. Whether it be physical pain or mental pain, the effect is the same. However, this wishing things to be different can actually cause us to suffer more. In the dart sutra, pain and suffering are explained through an analogy of two darts. The first dart that hits you is painful, yet unavoidable. It is what the world does to you, simply an outcome of living. The second dart, however, is avoidable, and hurts just as much. This dart is suffering, caused by the way you react to the experience of pain. Essentially, when we experience pain, we often condemn ourselves to further suffering by how we react to the pain, causing us to get hit with this metaphorical second dart. If we react to the pain by acknowledging it and observing it rather than wishing it away, we can avoid suffering and limit our discomfort to only that which is inevitable and out of our control.
In meditation, we practice being mindful of what we are experiencing, especially if it is discomfort. Whether it is physical discomfort or intrusive thoughts, we observe them, but do not take on an attitude of dislike towards them. In this way, the practice of meditation and thinking in this manner can be applied to your life, even when you are not actively meditating.
After the first couple of sessions, my discomfort seemed to go away, but maybe I had just become more comfortable with it. For half an hour on Tuesday afternoons, I was able to quiet my inner monologue of anxious thoughts. As I breathed, I was able to relax my perennially tense body and feel at ease. The stress and anxiety did not leave me, but instead felt further away as I observed them from a distance, less threatening.
In a world as stressful as today’s, it can feel impossible to escape from it all and feel genuinely relaxed and at ease. While the practice of meditation has given me a half hour each week of focused relaxation and mindfulness, it has also helped me to cope with my stress and anxiety throughout my days, at times when I am not actively meditating. When I begin to embark down an anxious spiral, filled with worry over things I cannot control, I am now more likely to be able to stop myself, take a breath, and get back to what I need to. When I experience mental and emotional discomfort, I have been able to shift my thinking from being frustrated with myself for having these feelings to instead observing them, recognizing them, and allowing them to exist.
Based on my experience, I believe that everyone should give meditation a fair shot. This means attempting more than once, at least a couple of times at minimum, because it can take awhile to get the hang of it. Thinking in this way and just sitting with our bodies mindfully is something that is very forgeign and unfamiliar to a lot of people in today’s world. It might feel like you’re wasting your time at the beginning, but I promise that if you stick with it, you’ll enter into a world that feels much less stressful and threatening than it ever has before.