“True prayer and love are learned in that hour when prayer becomes impossible and the heart has turned to stone.” – Thomas Merton
The Buddhist tradition tells us that when the common difficulties we encounter in meditation are strong, we can apply specific antidotes to transform these hindrances to clarity. For attachment and unhealthy desire, there is the antidote of reflecting on impermanence and on death. For anger and fear, there is the antidote of practicing loving-kindness and forgiveness. For sleepiness or boredom, the antidote is to arouse energy through moving the body. For restlessness, the antidote is to bring calm or concentration through inner techniques of steadying and relaxing. And for the doubting mind the antidote is faith or inspiration through reading or speaking with someone wise or finding a way to inspire oneself.
If you do not have any training and skills to help you work with these challenging energies, they can seem overwhelming or too difficult and you may want to give up on your meditation or spiritual practice. This is why it helps to have a teacher and systematic training to begin to work with your mind: your mind and the forces you encounter there can be very confusing.
Buddhist teachings describe the deepest roots of human suffering; “greed, hatred, and delusion.” These energies are what get us into trouble. The forms they take in meditation grow from these roots. We may not be initially worried by these energies, “Oh, just a little desire and aversion, some anxiety, dislikes and ignorance, and a little bit of unclarity of mind.” We think, “Easy, I can work with this. That is not too bad.” But after we have meditated more deeply, we discover how powerful they are—that greed means confronting attachment in the deepest sense, that our desire is a powerful and primal kind of force; and that hatred means discovering there is rage within us like Attila the Hun and Hitler. All of these are found in each person’s mind. Greed is the deepest kind of hunger that drives the world. Delusion includes the darkest kind of confusion and ignorance.
These states are powerful. They are the forces that make war in the world. They are the forces that create poverty and starvation in one country and abundance in another. They are the forces that cause the whole cycling of what is called the samsaric repetition of birth and death to take place. And we will encounter them when we practice mindfulness, living in the present moment with steady, concentrated attention.
This is not easy. At times it seems overwhelming. Yet here is where we learn. Thomas Merton said, “True prayer and love are learned in that hour when prayer becomes impossible and the heart has turned to stone.” In facing the most difficult of these energies honorably, if you let yourself sit with mindful loving awareness of them, there will come a real opening of the heart. This opening of the heart, body, and mind takes place, because we finally stop running away from our boredom, or our fear, or our anger, or our pain. It is here we become free.
This is an excerpt from ‘Bringing Home the Dharma: Awakening Right Where You Are‘
