Questioning the Benefits of Meditation
 

All,

I have been a meditator for twenty years and have gained some benefit from the practice but after this time still get stressed or upset at life's daily challenges. Do the benefits of meditation continue to grow or does meditation simply have limits?

Well, I would say that it depends on what you are trying to achieve.
I take it you want to become free from stress and upset in daily life?

I don't know how you meditate, but there are people who claim that a lot of the stress and upset's fell away after some intensive vipassana retreats in the Mahasi Sayadaw style. Some of their findings can be found https://www.dharmaoverground.org/

After 20 years you might want to take a long good look at exactly what you are doing during meditation.

With Love
Eelco

Hello and welcome, Willyeast.

Much depends on the type of meditation we do and how long we actually meditate every day. Plus what we do with the rest of the day when we are not formally sitting.

And yes, life can be stressful and challenging. There are always things to be done, issues to be resolved. This is the nature of life in a physical body.

From my own experience of 40+ years of meditation I can say that the benefits of meditation continue to grow. On a simply practical level things which once might have caused us stress become less of an issue. We deal with them and move on.

But the real value of meditation (for me) is discovering that centre of peace and stillness within, which has always been present but which is so easily overlooked.

I do believe that meditation has no limits but it all comes down to how deeply we want to take our meditation.

Peace

Can you elaborate on how we can take our meditation more deeply? Also will the benefits of meditation
stay with us from one life to the next if one believes in the concept of reincarnation?

and therein lies the key to ever present inner silence

My input on going deeper in meditation ...we stay with the things we love...
or the things we enjoy. :smile:

I think it depends what type of meditation we do. For example, sitting observing the breath for 20 minutes twice a day can be very calming and we may feel the benefits afterwards for a while, but this is unlikely to take us into very deep states. (Others may disagree).

Catsquotl mentions vipassana retreats. These are usually ten days long and I know people who have found them quite transformational. Simply being in that kind of environment, away from our usual routine, focused on certain practices, means that we can go much deeper. But I have never done a vipassana retreat myself. I don't like the condition that we do not do any other practice during the retreat. If I was doing a ten day retreat then I would stay at home doing my usual meditation.

For me, the key to taking our meditation more deeply is to sit for longer. I don't know how long you sit, but however long you sit you can always double it. The mind may complain at first because it wants to do something else, but we do get used to sitting for long periods.

I do believe in the doctrine of reincarnation but I cannot really answer this.

We may read about the Saints and Yogis of India who are drawn to meditation from a very young age and who naturally seem to enter states of samadhi. Presumably they previously attained high states and they have incarnated to continue the process, for whatever purpose.

As for the rest of us, I can only speak from my own experience. There was nothing spiritually special about me when I was growing up, but at the age of 19 I felt a compulsion to learn to meditate (without knowing anything about meditation). When meditation was explained to me, along with the associated doctrines of reincarnation and karma it all immediately made sense to me and seemed very familiar. Presumably I had done this before.

And so I began. But I still found the first year exceedingly difficult. After the initial excitement I discovered that meditation was hard work and my mind complained at great length. It took a year for me to start considering meditation as going home.

Peace

Indeed. We cannot let the mind run riot during our daily activities and expect it to suddenly become quiet when we sit down to meditate. :smile:

Peace

A friend of mine does Vipansna retreats regularly. The fact that she so engages (or shall we say, disengages) time and again suggests that she is deriving value from the immersion.

On my part, I have not attended any such retreat and so cannot comment.

About past lives etc. there is so much overwhelming ’evidence’ that it’s difficult to ignore, in my opinion. A friend of mine, who recently crossed over, has seen or rather was shown several past lives by Shiva* (* a part of the trinity in the Hindu belief system) in deep meditation from which his mind could understand karmic* (* law of cause and effect) consequences.