Walking home from hot yoga yesterday, a friend asked me how I felt.
“Irritated,” I said.
“Wow. I’ve never heard anyone say that before,” She said, “relaxed, a little high, but not irritated.”
We talked about my meditation practice and about how sometimes my meditation sessions leave me feeling angry.
“I’ve been struggling with meditation too.” She said.
I wondered if this implication about me was true. I asked myself, “Have I been struggling with meditation?” I didn’t respond out loud but, internally, it became clear that I have not, in fact, been struggling much with my twice-daily meditation practice.
Most forms of meditation (that I’m aware of) are intended to starve the cognitive functioning of the mind of attention and energy, temporarily removing the buttress of self-reification, sliding the blocks out of the psychological Jenga tower, freeing the whole psyche to fall down naturally into a lower energy state. And when it all falls down, it’s usually an ugly mess.
What comes up during and after meditation is all the shit we’ve been sweeping into the corners of the mind, hiding away in our mental closets. All that stuff bubbles to the surface to be witnessed and released; it sometimes says a timid “hello.” We might feel anger, sadness, grief…
