I don't think that there is any person that I've ever spoken to that has said meditation is easy.
I think maybe 99.
99% of people,
Particularly in the first year of meditating,
Say this is very hard,
Or I can't do it,
Or it's simply impossible,
Or some form of this type of description.
The irony of it is that this type of description is very fair and very,
Very honest because it is extremely difficult to meditate.
Most people can't meditate,
And very few people have any success in meditation,
Even if they do it for many,
Many years.
When we see this common problem,
We have to ask ourselves,
Why?
What is incorrect about the meditation that I'm doing?
And many people will come to think about that the problem is related to the style of meditation they're doing,
As opposed to something else.
The irony of this fact is that the reason why most people can't meditate or do not have success in meditation is that they are missing the preliminary stages of which many traditions or schools of thought had.
If we were to take a generic approach to it,
We could look at,
Let's say,
The yoga of Hinduism,
And we can look at the Buddhist traditions as well.
So before you meditate in Buddhism traditionally,
You of course are becoming a monk,
And thereby you are giving up your life,
Your belongings,
You're changing your clothes,
You're shaving your hair,
You're simplifying every aspect of your life that you can possibly come up with.
You're changing your diet,
You're changing every part of your lifestyle.
It's completely different.
Now the reason why you do that is because you're trying to get a base level of calmness and less mental fluctuations of the mind.
This is the key here.
The reason why people can't meditate,
You have to have a base level in your mind of little fluctuations in your mind before you can even meditate.
Otherwise,
It's not going to work for you.
So if we were to look at the yoga traditions,
They also had many preliminary steps before you started meditation.
So first you have to change the way your morals are.
You need to be an upright person.
Once you've done this,
Then you need to change your diet and eat foods that are sattvic,
Which are very helpful for meditation.
After you've done that,
You have to learn to sit cross-legged with a straight spine to a level of comfort where you can sit in that posture for a very long time.
After you do this,
You need to practice pranayama,
Breathing exercises,
Which help to calm and train the mind and pull it together a bit in the way that one would be breaking in a horse.
Once you've done this,
Then you're starting to turn your senses more inside.
After you've done this,
You have to learn concentration techniques.
This is why there is so much forms of mantras.
The reason is that the mantras are helping the mind to concentrate.
So once again,
There are so many steps before you go into meditation in the yoga tradition so that your mental fluctuations are at a minimum.
So you can meditate.
If you actually go out and teach meditation,
You will see people that have success in meditation is because they have a base level of calmness to start off from the beginning.
If a person doesn't have a base level of calmness in their mind after the beginning,
Their meditation is never successful and will never be successful.
Therefore,
If we want to meditate and get into deep meditation,
We really need to change our approach and remind ourselves from the start,
I may need to do things like yoga asanas first,
Or I may need to do mantras and chanting first,
Or I may need to do breathing exercises first.
You need to work out ways to calm,
Control,
And focus the mind before you can meditate.
Those methods I just gave you are some of the traditional methods,
But there are other ones.
So if you're not succeeding with your meditation,
Take a few steps back,
Follow what the ancients did,
And once your mind is ready,
Then you can go meditate,
And then you'll have great success with great rewards.
