When sitting is hard

The teaching

As the meditation masters' own counsel, from the desert monks to the Zen hall teaches it.

Two kinds of trouble

Every school knows that sitting still can be hard. Some difficulties are ordinary: boredom, restlessness, sleepiness, aching knees, the wish to be anywhere else. Others are stronger: a racing heart, panic, a flood of old grief or memory, shaking, a sense that the body or the world has gone strange and unreal. The masters give two different answers to these two kinds of trouble, and the skill lies in telling them apart. Ordinary restlessness is sat through with patience. Panic, terror and unreality are signs to stop.

Acedia, the noonday demon

The desert monks called the ordinary trouble acedia. Evagrius describes it as the demon of noon: it makes the sun seem to stand still and the day fifty hours long, sends the monk to the window to see whether anyone is coming, fills him with dislike for his cell, his work and his brothers, and paints other places where life would surely be easier. Its counsel is always to leave.

The desert's answer was to stay, gently. Go and sit in your cell, Abba Moses told a brother, and your cell will teach you everything. When Antony himself was weighed down by it, the story goes, an angel showed him the way: sit and plait rope for a while, then rise and pray, then sit and work again. Restlessness is met by changing the activity, not by abandoning the practice: a little sitting, a little walking, a little plain work with the hands.

Makyo, the visions of the Zen hall

Zen teachers warn of makyo, a word that means the realm of demons, by which they mean the strange things that appear when concentration deepens but is not yet clear. Lights and colours, figures and faces, sounds and smells, the body seeming to swell or shrink, to float or sway, movements that come by themselves, tears or laughter. The teaching is the same for all of them. They are neither good nor bad, neither enlightenment nor a danger in themselves, and they are not to be clung to or feared. They are told to the teacher, and the sitting goes on with the breath.

Zen sickness and the soft butter

Hakuin, the great reviver of Rinzai Zen, wrote of the illness he brought on himself by too much striving: his head burned, his legs were as cold as ice, his ears roared like a rushing stream, he grew timid and exhausted, and he could not settle to anything. He tells that a hermit in the hills taught him two things. The first was to bring the attention and the breath down, out of the head, and let them settle in the lower belly and the soles of the feet. The second was to picture a lump of soft, fragrant butter resting on the crown of the head, melting slowly and flowing down through the head, the shoulders, the chest, the belly and the legs to the feet, warming and easing everything it passes.

The lesson Zen draws from him is that strain rises and calm sinks. When practice makes the head hot and tight, the attention goes down to the belly and the feet.

The hard stages of insight

The old Buddhist manuals of insight expect hard stages on the way, and name them. After the knowledge of arising and passing away comes the knowledge of dissolution, when everything seems to be coming apart; then the appearance of all things as fearful; then their appearance as danger; then disenchantment; then the longing to be free; then re-observation; then equanimity about all formations; and then conformity, at the threshold of the path. Fear, misery and disgust are expected along this road.

The same manuals assume a monk on long retreat, seen by a teacher every day, who knows both the stages and the person. They are not a map for anyone to push through alone at home. For a reader, the stages explain why distress can come with practice; they are not a reason to keep going when it does.

The signs to stop

Some signs mean stop, now: a pounding heart, shaking, breath that comes short and fast, a flood of memory, numbness, a sense that the body is not one's own or that the room is not real. Stopping is not failure. No tradition asks a beginner to sit through terror, and those that guide people through hard stages do so with a teacher close by.

Coming back to the room

Open the eyes and look around. Name five things that can be seen, slowly, out loud if that helps, and then things that can be heard and touched. Press the feet into the floor and feel the chair under the body. Stand up and walk. Run cold water over the hands, drink something warm, eat something plain. Speak to someone.

Hakuin's counsel holds here too: bring the attention down out of the head and into the feet. In the hours afterwards, ordinary things steady a person best: food, a walk outside, company and a full night's sleep.

Sitting again, more gently

On another day, if at all, sit for less time, with the eyes open and the gaze resting on the floor. When the breath or the body feels charged, choose an anchor outside it: the sounds in the room, an object in view, the feel of the hands on the knees or the feet on the floor. Walking practice is often gentler than sitting.

Teachers who work with trauma speak of a window of tolerance: practice stays inside the range in which a person still feels steady, and turns back towards safety before that edge is crossed. Long silent retreats are not the place to begin, and anyone with a history of trauma, psychosis or mania looks for a teacher who knows that history.

When to seek help

Most hard moments pass within minutes or hours. If distress, unreality, panic or sleeplessness stays for days, or dark thoughts come, a doctor or therapist is the right company, and in an emergency, the emergency services. To say that meditation brought it on is nothing to be ashamed of: good teachers have met it before, and so have doctors.