HOW TO MEDITATE
Letting Go Of Expectations, part 2
By Tergar Meditation Community • 3 min read
By Tergar Meditation Community • 3 min read
The unconscious desire to create constancy is a very human trait. At the beginning of any endeavor, we instinctively create a standard for ourselves, checking and calculating as we go along in an attempt to match it. For example, let’s say you’ve resolved to start bringing your lunch to work, instead of buying take-out on your break. For the first few weeks, you feel pretty good about the homemade sandwiches you’re bringing, so wholesome and tasty, and cheaper too. Then one day you bring one that misses delicious by a mile — soggy on one side, burnt on the other. Ugh, tomorrow you’ll get back on track! But the next day, you end up buying some greasy and overpriced takeout on your break. Now you feel regret, you feel annoyed with yourself. Everybody does this. We get aspirational, aim to be consistent, and then feel lousy when we diverge from our self-created goal.
When we have committed to the path of meditation, we tend to impose this desire for consistency on that, too, so should we experience any sort of dip in our meditation practice, we feel uncomfortable, dissatisfied, insecure — all those bugaboos start vying for our attention. But this habit of seeking consistency really has no place in a meditation practice. Try to free yourself from any expectation that anything about your practice is going to remain perfectly steady, or that you’ll be able to replicate any experiences you might have. Just be.
In just being, you can’t accidentally mess your meditation up, or escape from it, or sabotage it. Even if you try to annihilate it, if you’re just being, you’ll only enter meditation even more profoundly. So let go, and whatever comes up, let it be. Whether it’s good or bad, whether you’re feeling happy or unhappy, it’s all happening within awareness. Everything is a manifestation of awareness. All experiences are the waves in that ocean of awareness.
“The simple awareness that is the essence of natural mind is too close to recognize. It’s there when we wake up in the morning, wherever we go throughout the day, when we eat, and when we get ready to go to bed.”
– Mingyur Rinpoche –
Learn meditation under the skillful guidance of world-renowned teacher Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche at your own pace.
Tergar Meditation Community supports individuals, practice groups, and meditation communities around the world in learning to live with awareness, compassion, and wisdom. Grounded in the Tibetan Buddhist lineage of our guiding teacher, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, our online and in-person programs are accessible to people of all cultures and faiths, and support a lifelong path toward the application of these principles in everyday life.
“Your awareness is bigger than your negative thoughts. So when you can hold sensations in your awareness, that is kindness. If you feel like you can’t let go of your aversion to some of them, that’s okay too. Just be with your aversion. When you allow yourself to have an aversion, that is love. That is compassion. That is forgiveness. So anything is okay: panic is okay, depression is okay. Guilt, destructive thoughts, whatever — it’s okay. All of these feelings are just like clouds in the sky, coming and going.”
“It is really important that we try to believe in ourselves. Of course, sometimes we make mistakes, but we can be willing to learn from them. Even if we feel like a failure, we can view that failure as a chance to grow.”
If we’re coping with a heavy, complicated problem, we’re often too busy to feel lonely. But sometimes, loneliness itself becomes our major problem. What’s happening is that our monkey mind is zooming in on the feeling, exaggerating it. Sometimes we think, “I don’t really have any good friends,” when what we really mean is we do, but they’re not around, or we don’t feel connected to them at that moment. Sometimes we think, “Oh, I don’t want to be around other people,” and we isolate ourselves. Later on, when our mood has shifted and we want company, we forget that we ourselves created that environment, and we feel lonely.
If you enjoyed reading our articles, please join our mailing list and we’ll send you our news and latest pieces.
2025© Tergar International. The Tergar logo is a registered service mark of Tergar international.
