Feeling Good, Feeling Bad

Insight Meditation: The Practice of Freedom, Shambala

Joseph Goldstein

FEELING GOOD, FEELING BAD: PROGRESS IN MEDITATION

Our entrenched programming to avoid pain and to grasp at pleasure shows up in our practice in yet another major way. We too often misunderstand meditation by believing that if it feels good, we are doing well, and if it hurts, we are failing [as practitioners]. If we have a painful sitting, the meditation is not going “right”, but if the feelings are pleasant, light, soft, floating, tingling, then we are successful meditators. All of us find such conditioning very hard to drop. The source of our error is simple but tenacious: we like feeling good, and we do not like it when it hurts.

Our progress in meditation does not depend on the measure of pleasure or pain in our experience. Rather, the quality of our practice has to do with how open we are to whatever is there. As the path of insight unfolds, we go through certain stages of practice where painful feelings predominate. That is just what characterizes those stages. Pleasant, rapturous, very light or very serene feelings predominate at other stages. These experiences arise simply because we are in those particular places of practice.

The liberating path leads through many such cycles, and the pleasantness or unpleasantness of any particular experience does not in itself determine how advanced any given stage is. We could be in a later stage of pain, in which the practice is deeper than it was in an earlier stage of bliss.

So pleasant or painful feelings do not indicate how well your practice is going. The goals we seek through practice are wisdom and compassion, not some permanent tingle. How long it takes for many of us to learn this one!

I will tell you a sad little meditation story. During a time when I was doing intensive practice for a couple of months in India, my whole body dissolved into radiant vibrations of light. Every time I sat down, as soon as I closed my eyes, this energy field of light pervaded my whole body. It was wonderful, it felt terrific. “Ah, I got it!”

After those months in India, I went back to America for a while. When I returned to India, I fully expected my body of light to travel back with me. I began sitting intensively again, but the radiant vibrations were gone. Not only was there no longer a body of light, but my body felt like a painful mass of twisted steel. As I sat and tried to move my attention through that tight and twisted block, there was so much pressure and tension, so many unpleasant sensations.

The next two years were the most frustrating and difficult periods of my practice. Why? Because I was not being mindful. I believe I was being with the pain and unpleasantness, but actually I was not accepting them, not fully opening to things just as they were. In truth I was practicing in order to get something back – that pleasant, vibrating body of light. It took me two years finally to realize that the idea in practice is not to get anything back, no matter how wonderful it might be.

What we have experienced in the past is gone. It is dead, it is a corpse. We do not have to drag the corpse along with us. We practice to open up to what is present, whatever it happens to be. It tingles. It’s light. It’s twisted steel. It doesn’t matter. When I finally understood that truth after two years of painful struggle, my practice again began to unfold. You need not to take two years to figure it out. Be watchful that you are not holding on to some past experience that you are trying to re-create. That is not correct practice; it is a sure setup for suffering. Simply be open, be soft, be mindful with whatever is present itself. This is the path of freedom.