Why People Won’t Meditate

Summary

People avoid meditation because it forces them to face their feelings and lack the skills to transform their nervous energy.

Abstract

The article explains that people struggle with meditation because they are used to distracting themselves from their feelings through constant movement or activity. When they try to meditate, all those feelings arise, leading to discomfort and restlessness. Most people lack the skill to observe, accept, and transform their energy into a deeper understanding of themselves and life, leading to fear and avoidance of meditation. The author suggests that people run away from themselves and rely on outside validation, leading to mental and physical contortions that prevent natural movement and creativity.

Opinions

Meditation forces people to face their feelings, which they are not used to.
Most people lack the skill to observe, accept, and transform their energy during meditation.
People fear meditation because it prevents them from running away from themselves.
Outside validation is prioritized over self

Why people run from this life changing activity

People have issues meditating because they’re used to being distracted from their nervous system, aka their feelings, by constant movement of the body and/or mind. When you sit in silence and distractions cease, all those feelings arise. You can’t distract yourself with large physical movements, so you squirm, you fidget, you clench your jaw, you grind your teeth*. Your thoughts get faster and more powerful, imbued with energy that’s usually caught up in some kind of chase or some kind of escape.

This is why most people deep down fear meditation. They say things like “it’s not for me, it doesn’t work, it’s woo woo bs” to mask the fear of facing themselves. The stillness and silence does not allow them to run. Without distracting your energy with physical or mental momentum, without being able to expend energy on moving towards goals or running away from fears, all your nervous energy must bounce around inside you. It can neither be created nor destroyed, only transferred and transformed. Most people lack the skill to observe their energy, accept it, then transform it into a deeper understanding of themselves and therefore of life. That’s why this nervous energy lies in wait and floods in when an opportunity arises.

Momentum can sweep you up and make you think you’re in control. You seem to be headed in a direction you chose, but don’t realize you’ve been carried away. You’re caught in the wave, not riding the wave. You use its encompassing power to bypass your intuition, to move past your deepest feelings and ignore them.

When you’re swept away, there’s no personal balance. You aren’t moving forward with self awareness. You’re not riding your surfboard, noticing the feedback your nervous system is giving you from head to toe. You don’t acknowledge this important information, information that allows adjustments to the uncontrollable energy that creates life and that life creates. You don’t have knowledge of intimate feelings because they seem to pale in comparison to other forms of energy. Forms you get swept up in, all to avoid paying attention to your own energy. That way you don’t have to isolate feelings, acknowledge them, and deal with them.

Many don’t even realize they are running. We have been taught to run as a reaction to being alive. We’ve been taught that being human is to run away from ourselves. We aren’t concerned with being ourselves but with receiving outside validation. Thus we contort ourselves mentally and physically, stuffing our feet in shoes that take away our natural movement and imprisoning our mind with ideas that take away our natural creativity.

Not to mention the fact our modern lifestyles render us stiff physically and mentally, with most people unable to sit or stand without discomfort, so they must continually shift their weight around.