Misconception #1 Meditation is just a relaxation technique
Relaxation is a key component of meditation, but meditation aims at a much loftier goal — awareness.
Misconception #2 Meditation means going into a trance
Meditation is not a form of hypnosis. You are not trying to black out your mind so as to become unconscious. If anything, the reverse is true. You will become more and more attuned to your own emotional changes. You will learn to know yourself with ever-greater clarity and precision. If you find that you are becoming unconscious in meditation, then you aren’t meditating.
Misconception #3 Meditation is dangerous and should be avoided
Meditation will naturally bring up various suppressed matters from your past that have been buried for a while. This is part of its purpose. It can seem scary, but it is also highly profitable. Take it slow and easy, and the development of your practice will occur very naturally. If anything gets dredged up, make sure you have a qualified teacher to help you process it.
Misconception #4 Meditation is running away from reality
Incorrect. Meditation is running into reality. It does not insulate you from the pain of life. It allows you to delve so deeply into life and all its aspects that you pierce the pain barrier and you go beyond suffering. It allows you to blow aside the illusions and to free yourself from all those polite little lies you tell yourself all the time. You are who you are, and lying to yourself about your own weaknesses and motivations only binds you tighter to the wheel of illusion. Meditation is not an attempt to forget yourself or to cover up your troubles. It is learning to look at yourself exactly as you are – to see what is thereand accept it fully. Only then can you change it.
Misconception #5 Meditation is a great way to get high
Well, yes and no. Meditation sometimes produces lovely, blissful feelings. But they are not the purpose. Furthermore, if you do meditation with that purpose in mind, they are less likely to occur than if you just meditate for the actual purpose of meditation, which is increased awareness.
Misconception #6 When you meditate, you sit around thinking lofty thoughts
Wrong again. Meditation is the practice of awareness – awareness of whatever is there, be it supreme truth or crummy trash. What is there is there. Of course, lofty aesthetic thoughts may arise during your practice. They are just pleasant side effects. Meditation is a simple practice. It consists of experiencing your own life events directly, without preference and without mental images pasted to them. It is seeing your life unfold from moment to moment without biases. What comes up, comes up.
Misconception #7 A couple of weeks of meditation and all my problems will go away
Sorry, meditation is not a quick cure-all. You will start seeing changes right away, but really profound effects are further down the line. It requires discipline and sometimes a painful process of practice. At each sitting, you get some results, but they are often very subtle. They occur deep within the mind, only to manifest much later. And if you are sitting there constantly looking for some huge, instantaneous changes, you will miss the subtle shifts altogether. You will get discouraged, give up and swear that no such changes will ever occur. Patience is the key. Patience. If you learn nothing else from meditation, you will learn patience. And that is the most valuable lesson available.
Adapted from the book: Mindfulness in Plain English by Bhante Gunaratana Published 2011
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