Was this student afraid to go deep in meditation? Many people will find this absurd, but there is a very good reason why this occurs.
To begin, what does it mean to be "deep in meditation"? Isn't meditation meditation? No. When we meditate, we can have a variety of experiences. Some meditations consist of gratitude statements, others of being mindful of the breath, and still others of focusing your attention on the heart chakra.
But some meditations, when you dive into a deep transcendence, that is where you go beyond the realm of thought altogether, this is a totally different experience. In this space, your whole awareness of you, the egoic structure, your identity, even the physical structure, has dissolved from your experience. In this space, you are no longer aware that there is a body or a YOU! It may be described as spaciousness, formlessness, unboundedness, bliss, love, or for some a serenity of timelessness.
So, why would something that sounds so fantastical elicit fearful feelings? Why would we be afraid of something like this? It sounds incredible, doesn't it? Our greatest fear is the fear of death. The one thing more than anything else that we are attached to is our physical and mental identity. We LOVE being who we are! And who are we?
For most of us, we are our body, our stories, our past and future, our possessions, the people in our life, the daily pleasures AND tribulations. Our identity is associated with all of this. It’s the measuring rod for who we are. Then you learn to meditate, and start repeating your mantra, and your mind starts going deeper, deeper, and deeper, until eventually, you’re on the edge of a HUGE abyss, looking over into a spaciousness of YOULESSNESS (I made this word up but you can use it). When you cross that threshold and plunge into the depths of boundarilessness, all that identity you've grown so attached to fades away. Puff! It's disappeared.
I recall my own initial experiences of this in my first week of meditating. I would get to that edge, get swamped by waves of fear, then find myself pulling back out of the meditation. It was a completely new and unknown experience beyond that edge and this unknown scared the hell out of me!
“I’m not going down there! I have no idea what’s down there and besides, I’m not ready to let go of everything that I’ve built up as my constructed identity!”
I’ve seen this same experience with many meditation students, as they resist the process of surrendering their attachments to ego structures, which in turn is holding them back from deep immersive meditations.
Once we feel secure in the knowing that we never truly disappear and that in letting go of our ego structures in meditation, we are able to really dive deep and discover the TRUTH of WHO WE ARE, then our meditations become deeper.
If you have ever struggled with going deep in meditation it could be that:
- A) You are using a meditation technique that doesn’t lead to deep meditations
Or
- B) It's possible that you're resisting letting go of your identity.
When you let go of one thing, you will discover so much more. You can rest assured that you are safe. You’re aren’t really losing yourself, you are FINDING YOUR SELF. Then the glory of you will be revealed
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