Daily online meditation coaching sessions
Have you tried meditation on your own and been unable to stick to it?
Have you tried meditation apps, or downloaded guided meditations and found that you stopped using them after a week or so?
Have you attended meditation retreats, only to find that you did not practice regularly once you got home?
Meditation is an excellent tool to get peace of mind and spiritual growth or calm focus, but there are 3 big challenges with meditation that most students do not realise:
CHALLENGE 1: You are using your untrained mind to try and train your mind! That is like expecting an unruly wild elephant to train itself!
Just think: your mind has experienced a lifetime of “training” in distraction and lack of focus. No one can undo that in a couple of days, or even a couple of weeks!
This means that after a few days when you sit for your meditation practice, your mind will try every trick in the book to derail your practice. You will experience the entire spectrum of tricks: agitation, boredom, anxiety, distraction, and doubt.
Since there is a barrage of persistent tricks, you need to understand ways in which to tackle each of these obstacles on your path. And that can be challenging.
Otherwise, your mind will simply trick you into giving up meditation altogether for one or more “valid” reasons.
CHALLENGE 2: There is a lot of confusion and misunderstanding around the practical aspects of meditation.
At first glance meditation may appear to be simple, and the basic mechanics of meditation are, in fact, quite simple: Observe your breath, or chant a mantra, or look at a candle, or any one of hundreds of such techniques.
But dig deeper and a lot of confusion arises:
- How do I tackle a distracting thought?
- What happens if I feel sleepy?
- I am supposed to be without any thought, but my mind is buzzing with activity. What do I do?
- Anger is arising in me – what do I need to do?
- I get frustrated when I cannot do what I intended to do: pay attention
- I sat for an hour but actually paid attention for only around 5 minutes
- Why am I wasting my time with this?
- When is it ok to act on a thought / emotion and when to set it aside and continue meditating?
- Something very disturbing comes up from my past memories and I don’t know how to handle it
As it turns out, when we dive into the practice of meditation, a ton of questions arise that need answering. This can turn meditation that appears to be simple into something quite complex with many unknowns to be handled.
Being able to successfully learn meditation and practice it requires getting continuous feedback on your practice and modifying it until meditation works for you.
CHALLENGE 3: You try to do alone, what can be much easier with help from a mentor / coach and a dedicated group.
Beginners in every game use coaches or mentors who have been through the grind and can provide guidance through the process of becoming proficient at meditation. In fact, not just beginners, even professionals at the top of their field benefit from a solid coach who can help them take their skills to the next level.
As a beginner at the meditation game, what you need is a personal coach and the support of a dedicated group of practitioners to be able to overcome the enormous initial challenge till you have formed a solid habit and established yourself in the practice of meditation.