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For the past three weeks, we’ve been exploring all the reasons why you might come to conclude that you can’t meditate. We’ve looked at misunderstandings about the need to clear your mind, the ways in which expectations can get in your way, and how self-judgment can lead to incorrect conclusions about your meditation abilities. 
There’s one more thing we need to chat about: Resistance.
Meditation can be challenging, because it involves sitting alone with your own mind, seeing what’s really there. All the habits, busyness, avoidance tactics, and distractions life provides as cover for what’s going on in your mind are no longer there. It can feel quite uncomfortable, even frightening, to expose your mind in this way. You might well discover that you don’t know how to be alone with yourself, and you might feel uneasy and anxious.
In other words, meditation threatens to expose you to things you might not like about yourself or emotional experiences you don’t want to have. When under threat, it’s only natural to resist what’s threatening you.
Instinct pushes you to avoid negative emotions, but mindfulness practice directs you to turn toward and embrace them non-judgmentally. Instinct often wins, because it’s strong and typically unconscious, therefore it goes unchallenged. Instinct can manifest in a number of ways: finding it difficult to squeeze meditation into your day, feeling too restless to sit still, getting bored during practice, being too tired to stay awake during meditation, deciding that everyone else’s needs are more important than your own, etc.

This Week's Peaceful Moment: Golden Mantled Ground Squirrel, Banff National Park, Alberta
 

All of these difficulties arise from resistance to meditation. Some people are aware when they’re resistant. They’re able to articulate their apprehension about meditation. Others are not as self-aware. They may feel a sense of frustration in being unable to find time to meditate or to be able to overcome sleepiness, for example, without realizing they’re resisting the practice.
Resistance isn’t necessarily a full-time problem, either. It’s not uncommon to flip-flop between a strong desire to meditate and a strong aversion to practice. One moment, you’re determined to sit every day this week, no matter what, and the next moment you’ve decided that you can’t practice because you’re just too busy. It can feel a bit like you’re at war with yourself. When this comes up, it too, can make you feel unfit to practice meditation. One of my students told me, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I really want to meditate and I know how good it is for me, but I just can’t get myself to do it.”
This student isn’t alone, but she’s incorrect in her conclusion that something’s wrong with her. Her rational decision to meditate because it’s beneficial is butting up against her fear of what she’ll discover about herself when she does it. It’s manifesting in a tug-of-war that’s got her confused and frustrated.
How to get past resistance
The only way to move past resistance is to challenge it. If you let yourself off the hook and walk away from meditation, the resistance remains forever. So, you may need to push yourself a little to start with. Yes, this isn’t easy, but here’s a step-by-step strategy to ease you into it.
You might like to start with body scan meditation instead of sitting meditation.