A common tendency

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.

You can’t stop being

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.

Back to the ocean

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.