Challenges and Strategies of Integrating Meditation into Daily Life

If you’ve had a good experience in an open awareness retreat, it’s likely that you’ll try to keep up the practice in your daily life—and find it more difficult than you thought.

Indeed, it’s harder to practise in daily life than in a retreat. However, we can make it easier. To do that, we look at why it’s difficult, and what can be done about it.

Busy life

Some of us live a life that is too busy. In this situation, we can’t even remember to practise, much less allow the mind to settle.

ACTION: Design an unhurried life. This sounds and is difficult. However, it’s worth doing one difficult thing for your long-term benefit and happiness. You’ll have to review your routine and identify the things that don’t really matter; e.g., mindless scrolling on social media, doing work for others who can do it themselves, consuming celebrity and sports news, etc.

The more you can leave out the unnecessary, the more time and space you have for the necessary. Actively create the kind of life that makes it easier for you to practise.

Competing desires

While the practice of awareness can be done while engaging in daily activities, whether that actually happens depends on which is stronger: the desire towards the activity, or the desire towards the practice.

If your desire towards the activity is stronger, then you will forget the practice and be lost in the activity. If your desire towards the practice is stronger, you can practise while doing the activity. In any case, for most people, desire towards the activity is usually stronger.

ACTION: Create the conditions for you to think more of the practice. If you think more of the practice, then you’re more likely to remember to practise. Only then is it possible for you to desire to practise; e.g., now that I’m writing about the practice, I’m necessarily thinking about the practice. Therefore, it’s now easy for me to practise.

So, what are the conditions you can create so that you think more of the practice? Make a list, and put them into action.

Difficulty maintaining motivation

Your motivation may still be strong immediately after a retreat, but it can wane faster than you think.

ACTION: Daily commitments to formal practice is a good idea, but don’t ask for more than what you’re actually willing to do. If you’re willing to commit to only 5 minutes each time, then so be it. Who knows? Perhaps after 5 minutes you feel like continuing.

Don’t assume that sitting is better. Walking could be a better option, and it usually is after waking up and after a meal.

Weekly meditation meetings with others are great for mutual support. The group members don’t have to be practising in the same way.

Don’t try to exert willpower. It’s not sustainable, and you’ll feel tired and thereby create a negative association between the practice and tired feelings. You’re much better off using your intelligence to achieve a better result.

Sensual distractions

For a long time, we’ve been fond of sensual pleasure, making it hard for us to remember to practise. Chances are this fondness is not going away after one 9-day retreat, and we’ll be getting distracted by sensual pleasures over and over.

ACTION: For sensual pleasures that hurt others, like sexual misconduct or pulling pranks, we should abstain. There is no excuse for these.

As for enjoyment of ethical sensual pleasures, there’s no need to fight it. Fighting it is useless. Instead, understand it. We want to understand sensual pleasure in three ways:

  1. The Enjoyment: We really want to know how enjoyable the sensual pleasure is.

  1. The Trouble It Causes: We also want to know the trouble we put ourselves through to get to enjoy the pleasure, and the trouble we experience as a consequence (if any).

  1. Getting Out of It: As we understand the two above experientially, we also get to understand whether the enjoyment is worth the trouble. And that’s how we begin to lose interest in sensual pleasure.

Not knowing how to practise in everyday situations

In daily life, we’ll meet situations we likely don’t meet in retreats, and may have difficulty practising no matter how we try.

ACTION: Get guidance from a competent teacher. Modern-day technology allows you to do that no matter how far your teacher is, so make good use of it.

Some Advice

Integrating meditation into daily life is a journey, not a destination. There will be bumps on the road, and times when your mind feels like a wild monkey.

No matter how hard and even how smart you try, there will be factors beyond your control that can cause you to do poorly. So, do be patient and kind to yourself. Accept that there will be times you do well and times you don’t. The times you don’t aren’t times to give up, but times to prove to yourself that you are not a quitter. Just start again.

Even if you do poorly in your daily life practice, it’s okay. The important thing is that you do it anyway, and keep learning. Then when you go for a retreat again, it won’t feel like you’re starting with a cold engine. Your engine has already warmed up. And you can apply the skills that you’ve honed in daily life where it’s actually more challenging, and therefore do better than your last retreat.

I have students who have managed to improve their lives through their daily life practice. It can be done and should be done if you want a life freer from suffering. So, no matter what, don’t quit.

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Giving Gifts or Giving Burden?

Image
Lay Buddhists are often taught the importance of giving (dāna)—especially to monastics—as a meritorious act. While this practice is deeply rooted in the Buddhist tradition, it has led to a growing concern: the excessive giving of gifts to monastics, resulting in monasteries having to deal with unnecessary possessions. Monastics do depend on lay people to give them what they need. However, when the giving becomes excessive, it creates a burden for the monastics. Their monasteries can become cluttered with items they neither need nor want. In this situation, the gifts have become a burden. To address this issue, lay Buddhists should be advised to practice wise giving . This involves considering the true needs of the recipient and the potential result of the giving. Instead of giving out of religious piety or a desire to gain merit, one can give wisely. What do the monastics really need? If you want to give but don't know what the monastics really need, you can always ask them. By g...
Read more

Beware of Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing: Protect Yourself from Hidden Personality Disorders

Sometimes I meet people who suffer because they are unknowingly living or working with someone who has a personality disorder. It’s important to be aware of such disorders, as being with individuals who have them can be distre ssing. When we think of mental illness, we usually think of conditions like schizophrenia, depression and anxiety disorders—conditions that are either very obvious or that people usually seek help for. We don’t usually think of another category of mental illness: personality disorders . There are many kinds of personality disorders, but let me speak of two which are not so obvious but surely worth knowing for our own protection: Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD) and Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) . Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD) “Antisocial” here does not mean “unsociable”. In fact, individuals with this disorder may appear highly sociable. They are antisocial in the sense that they are hostile or disruptive to social norms. They lack empa...
Read more

How To Deal With People Who Often Criticize You

Having people, or even just one person, in your life who is constantly critical of you can be very challenging. It’s possible that they don’t know the harm that they are causing. In any case, you’re the one having a problem and so you’re the one to do something about it. You need to find a suitable way to stop being constantly criticized. You first need to find out why they behave this way. There are a few possible reasons: They have a spoiled entitlement schema . They feel entitled to criticize you. They have an unrelenting standards schema . They can’t stand standards lower than their expectations, which they feel are normal and justified. They have a defectiveness schema . They try to feel better about themsel ves by putting others down. If they have a spoiled entitlement schema , your chances of getting them to stop is very slim. The only way they would even consider changing their behaviour, is being under the threat of losing something tha...
Read more