Starting Out Fresh

Why is it so difficult to really understand something so deeply that we feel it is part of who we are? Our small sangha has been studying and practicing for some years now and since the beginning of Covid in 2019 we have read together a number of books that approach Buddhism in much the same way: Tara Brach, Pema Chödrön, Loch Kelly and Tsoknyi Rinpoche have been amongst them. Now we have decided to go back and each in our own way find a means to deepen our practice. In my own experience of having attended quite a few retreats on deepening practice, and the emphasis always being on leaning more theory, I have found these seldom help because what keeps my practice limited or shallow is not a lack of knowledge but emotional stuff that gets in the way without me really understanding it. Ring any bells?

I should have learnt this a long time ago. In 2015 I completed Why Can’t I Meditate?in which I explored with a group of co-mindfulness meditators what made it so difficult to establish a regular meditation habit. What everyone discovered when they looked really carefully were deep seated and usually unconscious negative emotional reactions to their meditation. One person, despairingly felt deep down inside that whatever they did it would never work, another from a pragmatic missionary background that ‘idle hands make the devil’s work’ and so could never allow herself to simply settle and be, and another was persecuted by unrealistic expectations that made each sitting another shameful failure. And it went on - a whole book of deep-seated and troublesome emotional  habits.

I’ve also discovered in myself that I can listen to things for years and years and not hear them. The problem here is that our brains fill in the gaps without our even noticing it. The room that we are in right now need only be glimpsed momentarily for our brain to supply the rest and give us the impression of knowing all the details. Basically we just make stuff up based on what we already know. And we do this with everything - we start off listening to a guided meditation, drift off pretty much immediately, and then believing we have heard the instructions think we can now repeat them when in fact we have been away visiting the fairies! No wonder that even after years someone can say they are still thinking when meditating, as if it’s a huge failure, when in fact no one has even said that their thinking should be expected to cease.

So off we go, another fresh start, and the good news is there is no limit to the number we may have. What I’ve described above Buddhism neatly labels as habitual emotions and thoughts that act as ‘obscurations’. Obscuring what? Our beautiful calm, clear and blissful buddha-nature.

NW. 10 August 2025