Does Your Meditation Practice Help You Manage Overwhelm? Three Insights for Making Real Progress
- darynwober
- Feb 10
- 7 min read
Little did I realise what a supportive prevailing wind I had in my life in that moment. Although I would come to realise in the future it was just another experience to let go.
I found myself sitting cross legged on the unforgiving hard concrete floor of an ashram in the ancient holy city of Varanasi. Having spent the last 6 weeks in Chennai undertaking my latest round of teacher training I was ready to explore.
A week or so before I had been pondering where I should head at the end of the training. I still had another three weeks until I needed to return home and there was a deep thirst to learn and experience more in the homeland of yoga. My mind was drawing blanks. I scanned the map of India, talked to my teachers and fellow students, wondered the lanes of the internet, but still there was no obvious place that was calling me. Then, one day, I woke up, and Varanasi was on my mind calling and intuitively I knew this was my next step.
Upon arrival, and starting to acclimate to the pungent mixture of sensory assault in the city, I began enquiring where I might be able to find someone who could take me deeper with meditation. After various suggestions were offered I found myself gravitating towards one in particular. There was a monk that lived in a nearby ashram who taught mediation and related theory. I was told he spoke good English and was always willing to receive new visitors who often turned in to students.
I went to visit him that afternoon. My first meeting was somewhat bizarre. I sat at the end of a long table watching him inhale puri’s (fried Indian breads) and sabji (vegetables). He was a vigorous eater to say the least and I felt the surge of my judgemental mind creeping up on me. With the meal dispatched we began talking. I mentioned I wanted to learn more about meditation. He invited me to return the following day at 9am. I really wasn’t completely sold on the idea. The ashram was in major disrepair (so funny the things we judge), I wasn’t entirely sure about his manner and my western mind was doing its usual dance. Nonetheless I was there the next day at 9am.
When I arrived we went up to the top floor of the building. He sat down in a comfortable arm chair and he gestured for me to sit down on that hard floor. No cushions, no blocks, no bolsters - what kind of yoga studio was this!!?? He told me to close my eyes and sit quietly. Without any other instruction he proceeded to make phone calls, shout orders around the ashram to monks on various floors and to eat his breakfast. I sat there bemused, uncomfortable, full of doubt but I persevered. After what turned out to be an hour, he told me to open my eyes and come back tomorrow. For some reason I did.
This same dance went on for another three days. No instruction, total absence of quiet, pain in my legs, my back but the good surrendered student in me just sat there. On the fourth day however I had a profound experience. Something in me just decided to let go of judging everything. Of questioning what I was doing there, of feeling resistance to the surroundings, the noise, the lack of guidance (at least that was how I perceived it), to my own ideas of what a qualified meditation teacher should or shouldn’t be doing.
In that moment of letting go I experienced a deep sense of calmness and peace. It was a feeling I had not known before. At the end of the session he asked me to open my eyes. Rather than the usual confused look that he met on my face, I broke in to a spontaneous and heart felt smile. He looked back at me, laughed with the whole of his body, smiled back and said, “good, now we have started to learn something.”
Over the following couple of weeks he gave me some instruction and verbal guidance. I spent multiple hours each day meditating both in the ashram and in my room back at the guesthouse. I experienced profound states of peace and stillness. We might call these moments of transcending the mind at some level.
The prevailing wind I mentioned above was that I had closed down my business about 18 months prior to this moment. I had landed on my feet teaching yoga in Lagos, where I was living at the time, my income was stable, I had some savings. This was a moment in my life where at least day to day I had no worries. No pressing schedule. No real need to push myself in anyway apart from deepening my practice. As a result I was really able to let go and the result was opening up in to unexplored inner territory.
However, as Jack Kornfield famously put it in his book, ‘After the ecstasy, the laundry.’ Fast forward a few years. I’m in London. Married. Four year old daughter. The pressure of responsibility, keeping the bills paid. Dealing with the challenges that start to emerge for all us at a certain stage of life. Am I floating through the depths of consciousness in a profound state of peace in my meditation. ABSOLUTELY NOT! Does that mean that my meditation has regressed? ABSOLUTELY NOT! Has it helped me to clarify a little more what meditation is and isn’t? FOR SURE.
So this is what I’d like to humbly share in relation to how meditation can help to support balance in our lives even when external circumstances may have radically shifted. These are three areas where often practices are misunderstood and where as a result we may end up going around in circles rather than deepening our practice.
Meditation is not about being in an idealised perfect state
We often envision that, if we are ‘good’ at meditation, we should be able to find our way to an inner peaceful state just by sitting down in a crossed legged position. We are sold the idea that meditation brings peace and tranquility. Therefore when we sit down and find that our backs or legs hurt, that our minds wander and that we spend most of our time thinking about a holiday we’’d like to book, we think we are failing. The truth is that, although in the ultimate state of yoga, we are informed by those that have been there, we will experience abiding peace, this is the end game of a multi lifetime practice. This is not where most of, if not all of, us are in our lives.
In some ways, regardless of the type of meditation we are practicing, our early experiences may be very very brief moments of focus, absorption or awareness surrounded by vast oceans of distraction, discomfort, day dreaming. It will feel awkward physically to sit still. Difficult emotions may come up for us. We may wish to be anywhere but on the meditation cushion. This is all completely normal. Part of the practice is just learning how to sit non-judgementally with whatever arises and depending upon the type of meditation, returning to a particular point of focus.
Not all meditation is seated, in fact most of us aren’t ready for that
If you’ve been running around all day, triggered multiple times by various situations, have eaten meals on the go and rushed home - doesn’t it make sense that we find it hard to sit down and be still when we come to practice? The truth is that the quality of our practice, essentially are ability to be still at various levels, is determined by our patterns during the day. That’s why if we truly want to regulate our nervous systems and find peace, holistic change, no matter how small, is required.
I’m sure many of you relate the above. To help wind us down we can practice some basic asanas such as raising our arms up and down with the breath, taking some forward bends and practicing slowing down the movement and the breath. Then we might lie down on the floor with our knees bent and try to gently slow down our breath even more. If we are mindful or absorbed in this process, this is meditation too. At that point we may find that we have released enough energy to sit cross legged or in a chair for a while.
Expecting to come home from a frenetic day and immediately sit in ‘deep’ meditation without any preparation is just simply not realistic.
Meditation technique needs to be consistent over a sustained period of time -
If we wish to use meditation as part of yoga to bring about inner transformation we need to let go of the idea of variety. The challenge in today’s ‘meditation marketplace’ for want of a better expression is that there is a meditation for everything! This means that every time we meditate, if we so choose, we can listen to a different person, a different practice or technique. This essentially means we are wandering through many different experiences but we aren’t developing a long term practice pathway that systematically guides us to more and more reliable and stable states of meditation.
This is the advice given in the Yoga Sutras by Patanjali in relation to practicing one principle for long periods of time. Sri T Krishnamacharya taught the same view that meditation should be a structured pathway in order to yield ‘results’. It is only by practicing in this way that we really begin to see the ground of the mind and its patterns. A consistency of technique allows us to see the ‘inconsistency’ of everything else arising in our minds. This is when we begin to make progress.
So nowadays when I sit to practice, even with good preparation, my mind wanders a lot more than it did in those carefree days in India! The progress in my practice is that I am able to watch the movement of my mind and notice much more often when I’m not connected to the object of my meditation practice. I judge the experience less and can watch my mind doing it’s dance with a more gentle acceptance. I have no attachment to an expectation of how I should feel in my practice. This leaves me feeling more grounded and settled even as thoughts dance through my mind.
Overtime this type of practice helps us to develop emotional resilience and balance which is why it is so beneficial for those of us working on emotional regulation, or who experience overwhelm, anxiety and nervous system overload.
I’d love to hear about your meditation practice or the challenges you have setting one up in your life. Look out for a new course and retreat I’ll be offering in the coming months that will share techniques and practices for using the tools of yoga to support our busy lives and to manage overwhelm, emotional regulation and energy depletion.
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