I would still encourage you to try, if it feels manageable. Those might be the days when you need it the most. You won't feel like you want to do it, and that's normal — here's why:
Your Nervous System Is Reactive
When we are stressed, tired or in pain, our nervous system can become triggered. Perceiving a threat to our peace and integrity, it is on alert. This alert mode — often known as fight or flight — is the opposite of relaxation. It is the opposite of stopping.
Your body and mind might desperately need you to stop, breathe and relax. But everything in you will tell you to be tense and alert. These two states don't work very well together.
It doesn't make sense to stay in a tense state in this way. If there is something to be done, then we would take action. Absent that, we need to find a way to relax our system, as this supports our own wellbeing and healing — which also tends to result in finding better solutions to problems in our lives.
Tension and stress can trigger the release of cortisol, a hormone involved in our body's stress response. When stress becomes chronic, it can disrupt the body's normal regulation of cortisol and contribute to inflammation and other health problems over time.
You can choose to break the cycle. A daily meditation practice can help your system relax and regulate its stress response. It also gives you a routine to anchor within. It helps you come to yourself beyond the noise and challenges of everyday life.
Your Emotions Come to the Surface
You will sometimes read about anxiety and PTSD symptoms coming to the surface through meditation.
Meditation is a practice that helps us become more aware of our inner experience. All day long, we focus on something else — our families, work, commute, etc. Most people devote very little attention to their own experience of life.
The subconscious includes experiences that we are not aware of — either because we're not yet sensitive enough to our inner experience or because we have suppressed them.
Your focus and attention determine what you are aware of in your environment and experience. When we are focused on something external, like work or a relationship, it is easy to simply ignore the inner world. This is why cleaning or other activities can help people move through painful experiences.
And while movement is an essential aspect of healing, pausing in stillness is also an essential aspect. Movement alone, without pause, can become avoidance of our inner reality.
When we sit still, all that we could easily ignore when we were in movement starts to become known to us. Suddenly, we feel our undercurrent of anxiety more strongly. Our emotions of the day might start to come up.
It is not necessarily that meditation creates these things within us — it's just that in meditation we become more sensitive to them.
If your emotions are on the milder side — you become aware of your restlessness and stress, maybe some sadness, nervousness or anger — observing them and being with them through meditation can be perfectly fine. Learning to breathe through emotions and observing them helps us regulate our emotions and become less reactive.
If your emotions are much stronger than this — overwhelming grief, powerful trauma-related emotions, panic — you might want to pause meditation and look into other practices to help you with those specific emotions. You might also want to consider therapy.
Meditation has done its job of showing you something. But without experience navigating these kinds of emotions, you might find yourself overwhelmed. It may be best to address the emotional aspect head-on, perhaps with the help of a professional, work with different mindfulness practices for some time, and return to meditation when you feel more confident.
Emotional discomfort is a natural part of meditation. In fact, I think that an important reason for doing meditation is exactly to help us learn to find ease with discomfort. Most people act according to their inner discomfort — they lash out at others, collapse into an imagined sadness, give in to fear or react in other ways that are unhealthy.
If everyone learned how to simply be and breathe, observing their inner reactions, the world would be a much better place in many ways.
Your Mind Is Used to Stimulation
The mind craves excitement. Your soul might ask for peace, but the mind loves stimulation. In the modern developed world, the mind is like a drug addict. We have so many sources of stimulation — our phones, computers, Netflix. It is truly endless.
This means that when you stop in silence and stillness, it can be a bit of a shock to the system. If you've ever binged a Netflix series, you know how hard it is to push that stop button. You're hooked.
When we pause to meditate, we're trying to push pause on the movie of our everyday life. It's not easy to do.
Your mind might act out. You might feel restless and like you really need to go somewhere. This is also something to observe. Breathe and allow it to be.
You can set an alarm with a gentle chime to help you come out of meditation — this way, you know that you have an allotted time, and you don't need to pay attention to your body's impulse to get up and go.
The more you do this practice, the more you train your mind to be peaceful and less addicted to external stimulation.
Preparing the Ground for Meditation
Some spiritual masters don't prescribe the same meditation practice to everyone. Someone might be ready to do one hour of meditation. Someone else might be able to do only five minutes. While someone else might need to prepare the mind to even sit down for those five minutes.
But if you sit down to meditate, you at least have a chance to observe where you are at. A lot of my meditation sessions when I started were more noise than silence. And that's the case for a lot of people. We have noisy minds. It can feel frustrating when you sit down and your thoughts don't calm down. But that's part of it. You focus on the breath while you also notice how noisy your mind is.
Just taking some time to sit in silence helps you not only observe yourself and get to know yourself, but also helps your brain and your entire system decompress. Your brain needs silence. Your nervous system needs less agitation.
If sitting down like that feels impossible, there are walking meditation practices or other mindfulness activities that can help you train towards being more comfortable with your restlessness.