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Welcome to episode 3 of our series called Why Can’t I Meditate. On today’s agenda: How self-doubt and self-criticism can cause you to conclude you can’t meditate correctly.
Last week, I explained how goals and expectations can trip you up. When expectations don’t pan out, you might conclude the practice isn’t worthwhile. But, there are other hidden dangers caused by goal-setting. A goal can motivate you, but if you don’t achieve it, there’s a tendency to conclude you’ve failed, and failure discourages you and makes you feel bad, again sabotaging your practice.
I told you a goal is necessary to motivate you, but must be held lightly. Commonly, goals center around a desire to improve yourself. Perhaps you want to manage stress more effectively, approach others with more compassion, or be happier. There’s another hidden danger here. The desire to do or be better implies non-acceptance of yourself as you are now. Meditation becomes the practice of hating yourself, striving to be better, instead of the practice of knowing yourself.

Peaceful Moment of the Week: Little Qualicum Falls Park, Vancouver Island, BC
 

Mindfulness practice coaches you to accept everything without judgment, including yourself, just as you are. The practice is to notice your characteristics, actions, beliefs, thoughts, and feelings with kindness and patience.
Objectives centered on enlightenment, communing with angels, touching God, having out of body experiences, getting high, and blissing out aren’t much different than goals for self-improvement. These motivations indicate a dissatisfaction with life as it is, spurring on a search for something greater than yourself. They, too, constitute rejection of the present moment based on a judgment that what you have is too ordinary, or isn’t good enough.
So, am I telling you to give up your goals? No. As noted, they’re useful motivators. But, they need to be held gently, because if you cling to them tightly, they’ll get in the way of acceptance of the present moment. In each individual meditation session, it’s best to let go of expectations and objectives and focus in on whatever the present moment brings.
It’s not bad that you want to improve yourself, but self-betterment cannot emerge from a place of self-rejection. It has to start with self-acknowledgment, clearly seeing and accepting yourself as you are.
Your goals are not the only things that can lead you to criticize yourself and conclude that you’re a bad meditator. Unfortunately, it’s easy to find ways to chastise and feel bad about yourself.
When, for example, you start meditating there might be a commitment issue. You haven’t yet established a habit of sitting regularly, and the initial meditation experiences may not be quite what you expected them to be, so you don’t sit as often as you think you should. This can cause you to believe something’s wrong with you, that you don’t have what it takes to meditate successfully.
It’s common to end up meditating only under one of two conditions: when you feel like it, or when you feel bad enough to try to do something to help yourself. Your schedule is driven by emotion, the positive emotion of wanting to practice or the negative emotion that motivates you to help yourself. What you really need to establish a healthy practice is commitment, which is the discipline to practice no matter how you’re feeling.
Commitment isn’t easy, though, which is why