Hello, and welcome back to Practicing Human, the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life.

I'm your host, Cori Muscara. In today's episode, we're going to talk about the common hindrance that can arise in meditation practice and how to work with it.

More to come on that in a moment. First, let's settle in together with the sound of the bells.

Okay, so in this episode, we're going to address that the common pushback or thing that arises in the person's meditation practice, which is the refrain that says I can't meditate right now for x, y, z reason.

I'm not talking about the external factors that might be influencing that such as like I need to take care of my child instead of sitting down on the cushion, but more of the felt sense of like I can't meditate right now because I feel this or my mind's doing this or this is happening internally that I want to speak to first. Let's just zoom out and I'll say that I think the one of the biggest hindrances that arises for people.

In meditation is is the pursuit of certain kinds of experiences is the deep belief that I should be having a certain kind of experience right now, which sets up an expectation going into the practice and makes an enemy experiences that are uncomfortable that actually need presence and awareness and compassion more than anything.

And so when we go to our meditation practice trying to bliss out or expecting there to be this deep experience of peace or bliss or whatever the experience you have in your mind, we're already starting off on the wrong foot because we're going to create tension around the experiences that are actually there, which oftentimes, if not most of the time, include things that are less than pleasant, even just the subtle experience of boredom or just the neutral.

And so that brings us to this refrain that often arises, which is I can't meditate right now because my mind is very active. I can't meditate right now because I feel bored.

I can't meditate right now because I'm too sad. I can't meditate right now because I'm stressed and so do you see what's arising in there.

Some experience that is coming up for you that feels like it is in opposition to the thing that you actually need in a meditation practice or trying to get in a meditation practice.

But more specifically, I think it's the former it's like, oh, this is getting in the way of the thing that I need in a meditation practice, like to do a meditation practice, which is I need to become or I need to feel at ease.

A lot of this is much more subconscious than it is conscious. We might consider like, okay, time to meditate, but that feeling that arises of like, oh, I can't meditate right now.

And usually we're not going to feel on the blank. It's just going to be this feeling of like, I can't do this right now. Well, whatever it is, the experience that you're feeling that is telling you that you can't meditate right now is the very experience that you need to meditate on.

Or also known as like, hold space for or bring into your awareness because it's it's the orientation of that getting in the way of something that is actually going to further fracture you from yourself.

It's going to create more internal tension. And I think this is a big reason why people often get feel stagnant in their practice or their practice isn't serving them to take them to greater states of peace and eat.

And that's because they're they're in a sense trying to push away certain experiences to get to a certain experience that they're trying to get to.

And that is an inherently tense experience. You might have days where it's easier than others where you don't actually feel the tension where it's like, you know, there's not too many thoughts.

You don't the body feels relatively comfortable. It's not too many intense emotions. And we just like bring the attention to the breath. It's like, oh, cool. E is peace. I got it.

But as a long-term approach to feeling more safety in yourself, more inner peace, less inner torment, that approach is not going to work.

And that approach is encapsulated in that statement of, I can't meditate right now because of this.

Now, let's exclude some of the significant experiences such as like intense trauma right now. Yeah, okay. There's some degree of thoughts, visualizations, emotions in that that, yeah, we could say, well, can't that just be welcomed into awareness.

Yes. And the nervous system most likely doesn't have the bandwidth right now to bring too much awareness to that experience.

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