Pearls of Wisdom

Resistance to Meditation

There are times when you don’t feel like meditating. The very idea
seems obnoxious. Missing a single practice session is scarcely
important, but it very easily becomes a habit. It is wiser to push
on through the resistance. Go sit anyway. Observe this feeling of
aversion. In most cases it is a passing emotion, a flash in the pan that
will evaporate right in front of your eyes. Five minutes after you sit
down it is gone. In other cases, it is due to some sour mood that day,
and it lasts longer. Still, it does pass. And it is better to get rid of it in
twenty or thirty minutes of meditation than to carry it around with you
and let it ruin the rest of your day. Another time, resistance may be
due to some difficulty you are having with the practice itself. You may
or may not know what that difficulty is. If the problem is known, handle
it by one of the techniques given in this book. Once the problem is
gone, resistance will be gone. If the problem is unknown, then you
are going to have to tough it out. Just sit through the resistance and
observe that mindfully. When it has finally run its course, it will pass.
Then the problem causing it will probably bubble up in its wake, and
you can deal with that.

If resistance to meditation is a common feature of your practice,
then you should suspect some subtle error in your basic attitude.
Meditation is not a ritual conducted in a particular posture. It is not a
painful exercise, or period of enforced boredom. And it is not some
grim, solemn obligation. Meditation is mindfulness. it is a new way
of seeing and it is a form of play. Meditation is your friend. Come
to regard it as such and resistance will wash away like smoke on a
summer breeze.

From – Mindfulness in Plain English by Bhante Gunaratana
https://wisdomexperience.org/…/mindfulness-plain-english