In this week’s “Minute”, I want to focus on an important energy that we inevitably encounter in our meditation practice. It’s the same energy we encounter when we procrastinate any worthwhile habit, whether it be regular exercise, a dietary regime, or an artistic venture.
This energy is called resistance. If you’ve ever skipped meditation because you were tired, or you had more important things to do, or the dog needed to get walked, or you’d rather just wait until you got home from work, or because email was really, really essential to sort out… then you know aboutresistance.
But unless we are able to strategically outwitresistance, we never move forward in practice; we never learn how to surmount the 10,001 manifestations of resistance.
So I pose a challenge this week: For one week, meditate every day, NO MATTER WHAT. That’s your mantra: NO MATTER WHAT, park yourself on the cushion, bench or chair and sit for the prescribed time. I don’t care if you only meditate a minute a day, or if you sit for an hour twice a day. The time is irrelevant in this challenge. Whatever you do, sit everyday, NO MATTER WHAT.
Overcoming resistance to one thing has a tendency to snowball. And we start to imagine what our lives might look like if we were able to actually get out of our own way.
For a great little book on this theme, check out:The War of Art, by Stephen Pressfield.
Originally published on October 12, 2010