Underrated sources of mental tension in meditation

loosen up in unexpected ways

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Meditation is about more than one thing. But if it were just about one thing, it would be releasing mental tension so you can fully feel your experience. All of the fancy insights you are trying to get from meditation become nakedly obvious, in due time, once you drop inhibitions to feeling what is already going on. The same insights are available at the office or the monastery, when you allow yourself to see them.

You might be like: but what about distraction, aren’t I supposed to be staying focused? Yes. Continuity of attention is good. Enough continuity will likely rocket you into some wonderful bliss state, if that’s what you’re into. And the distraction that keeps you from establishing this is typically an automatic flinch. Relax all the flinching and you will find progressively expanding stillness, which you can point in some direction if you want to. The quality of a mind that is not being messed with constantly is tranquil, assuming that basic survival is taken care of.

There are sources of mental tension that meditators often don’t notice because they are simply accepted as background activities/properties of the mind. It’s not clear, until you learn to turn them off, that they are optional. But they are optional, and toggling them off is necessary to experience the profound depths of practice.

This is not a “meditation 101” post. For that, go here.

Tracking/predicting experience, rather than being open to possibility

We have an automatic tendency to monitor ongoing experience and predict the next moment. Mentally, this creates a sense of wariness or watchfulness, which is a layer of tension. Also, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: the mental intention to predict experience keeps experience predictable by reducing your sensitivity to variation.

Helpful tricks:

• Notice if there’s a moment of relaxation, or a pause in mental activity, after you think “I don’t know what will happen next,” or “I can’t predict experience.” See if you can ease into that pause.

• Notice how there is constant detail in sensory experience that you can’t predict. The next thought, the next flicker of body sensation, the next shade of emotion. Relax into the flow, allow yourself to be drawn in by the unpredictable flux of subtlety.

• See if you can let the breath drive itself, by responding naturally to the desire for oxygen rather than trying to keep your breath predictable, while maintaining mindfulness.

Reaching out and grabbing experience, rather than receiving experience

There is an unconscious tendency to direct attention to specific portions of experience—to mentally “squint” at what we’re looking at, for example. This is not actually necessary for perception. In meditation, it is typically more helpful to enter a mode of holistic, receptive experiencing, where we let the field of experience come to us.

Helpful tricks:

• Play with the prompt “I am a puddle, and experience is the rain.” (Thanks to Hormeze for the inspiration.)

• Notice that you are already listening without the decision to listen. See if you can do this with all of your senses.

• Allow your awareness to be broad and inclusive: lightly include both your head and your feet in experience. A wide aperture of awareness naturally creates a receptive mode.

Having a frantic pace of intending

Many intentions function best when held lightly. For example, when you’re walking to a destination, you typically don’t need to remind yourself to keep walking every few feet—you only need to remind yourself if you get distracted by something and stop walking. The intentional savoring required by focused meditation practice (like jhana practice, for example) is one of these intentions best held lightly: it is a direction we allow ourselves to move in. However, many novice meditators engage in the frantic renewal of intention, reminding themselves constantly of what they ought to be doing. Not helpful!

Helpful tricks:

• Reduce the pace and intensity of voluntary mental action. If the mind is chaotic in the short term, trust that this will settle down as you relax into pleasant feelings.

• Do the unhelpful thing intentionally, so you can get a feel for the helpful thing. Frantically issue a few mental commands to yourself—voluntarily engage yourself in thought repeatedly at a fast pace. Notice the turbulence this creates. Then, try to do the opposite: see if you can smoothly, slowly connect with one mental intention.

• Try, for a period, to completely let go of voluntary mental action. See what it’s like to have faith that the mind can settle itself, if you don’t shake it. (This may take some minutes, and may not happen if mental activity is particularly intense. It is also a whole style of meditation.)

Evaluating whether or not certain things are supposed to be happening in meditation

Mental movements that get in the way of absorption, sometimes called “hindrances”— like doubting your meditative skill, other discursive thought, restlessness—always occur in meditation, even to very experienced practitioners. Experience gives you the capacity to work with these mental events, it doesn’t banish them. So, generally, the most helpful attitude is one of “allow, then reprioritize”: don’t get disturbed by the mental event, just notice it and shift back to the intention of meditation. But many novice meditators instead stiffen up, tightening too intensely around the intention to keep mental activity restricted, in a way that is counterproductive.

Helpful tricks:

• Internally affirm “everything is allowed, everything can be interesting.” Detours can be fun parts of the trip.

• Check to make sure you’re not enforcing overly harsh extensions of general principles. For example, notice whether you’re interpreting “try not to intentionally get caught up in thought” as “never have or get caught up in thoughts.” If you are, stop it.

• See if you can hold the mental intention to meditate a bit more loosely. To get a feel for loosening intention, imagine throwing a ball at a specific target, and then imagine loosely chucking it in a direction.

• For a few minutes, drop all control. Allow random distraction while loosely noticing it, as if you’re a voyeur dropping in on your thoughts and feelings. Try to enjoy the randomness, the unpredictable nature of interior life. Then return to a loosely held intention.

Guarding against emotional intensity

Often, people are taught to emotionally contain themselves at a young age, and the most robust way to contain yourself is to not allow yourself to feel too intensely. This is adaptive in development, but unnecessary for adults with good emotional regulation. And yet the habit to constrain your emotional experience often remains present in adult meditators. It adds tension and drains the color from meditation and life.

Helpful tricks:

• Just ask: could I let myself feel everything 10% more? If that worked, what about 20% more?

• Check whether there’s a perceived boundary between you and the emotion in your experience, a sense that there’s a spatial “partition” in the way of feeling. If so, see if you can earnestly adopt the intention to relax that boundary.

• If your experience feels “dull” or “boring” or “unemotional,” what does that feel like? What is the texture? If the experience isn’t peaceful, there is probably some subtle anger, sadness, or fear in it that will intensify if you tune in. (And in the context of meditation, that is a good thing, assuming you’re in your window of tolerance.)

Tracking time, tracking space

Space and time—by which I mean, the sense of where on earth you are, and what time it is—aren’t directly created by bare sense experience, they are inferences placed on top. When you look at a sunset and you are absorbed in it, no part of the experience unambiguously tells you “it’s 6:22 PM.” Temporarily relaxing the tracking of space and time can create incredible experiences in meditation. Reflect on how flow states are typically characterized by dropping these frames of reference: wouldn’t it be nice to gain the ability to temporarily drop the frame?

Helpful tricks:

• Ask: what mental sensations, specifically, tell me that I’m located in this place, or this time? Once you notice that the feelings of space and time are being created by a mental process of “marking” or “tracking” reality, the tracking often diminishes all by itself.

• Play with the question: “what if there is only one eternal moment?” Or: “what if everything in my life has happened within one space of awareness?” The intention is not to entertain these as philosophical or intellectual truths, but to use them as temporary lenses on experience.

• Ask yourself whether there is a quality of awareness that is ageless, a quality has been the same since you were a child. See if you can tune into this foundational quality. Remembering spacious, expansive-feeling moments from childhood may help as a reference.