"I can't meditate!"

The first thing that actually drew me to mole wasn't the pebble bit, it was this essay about meditation. For years, I said that I couldn't meditate. It was the Number One excuse I used to keep me from trying. I couldn't sit still. I couldn't focus. I couldn't maintain a routine.

Obviously, I finally did decide that I wasn't going to allow that belief to limit me. But I wish I had read this essay years ago, because it probably would have helped make me realize that what I thought was an insurmountable problem, wasn't.

Nowadays people have a different confession to make to me. "I can't meditate," they tell me. The impulse seems much the same. "You may as well know this at once: I'm someone you'll despise. Don't bother trying to teach me. I already know I can't do it." And usually, as with the English confession, [which is, that "I can't write!"] there's a pinch of defiance mixed in: "and you can't make me try to learn it, either."

But in this case I do care. So I usually try to find out what they mean. There are a few people who really can't or shouldn't do quiet meditation -- there are a few conditions, physical and mental, that make it impossible or inadvisable. But these are very rare. Nobody who has confessed to me has referred to such things. What they say is that they sit down, and their minds go crazy; thought piles on thought; their anxiety increases, if anything; and if their minds settle at all, it's only for a moment.

Most experienced meditators will look a little perplexed at this description of meditative failure. "Yes," they'll say, "that's what happens to me, too."

What people usually describe sounds like perfectly good meditation. The problem, apparently, is that they expected something else to happen.

I think it was the combination of avoidance with defiance that struck me. It's like, I knew that meditation would be "good for me," but, like any kid, I wanted to avoid the bitter pills necessary for treatment. Further, that avoidance and defiance made me feel somehow strong inside, even though I knew it was a sham, a dodge.

The last thing I wanted to do was to sit & listen to my thoughts. Listening to the internal dialog of a depressive is less than fun, and I think I was always worried that it would just make the inescapable thought loops that much tighter. It wasn't just that I couldn't control my mind, but that I was its prisoner.

If you've discovered that you can't meditate, you have already learned the first of the only two things meditation has to teach you, to wit, that your mind is not under your control.

And if you want to find out what the second one is, well ... you've got to read the essay.