Question asked by Dave
Dear pastors,
Recently I started loving kindness meditation. First 2 days were great but 3rd day I started getting fearful scenatios play out in my mind and had to do deep breathing to calm myself down. And that night I had quite a bad dream.
It seems they are connected given the timing of the events but yet how can loving kindness give rise to all that horror?
Dear Dave,
Thank you for your question. What you are going through is actually a common experience that some people go through when engaging in meditation. This is nothing to be overly worried about as long as you continue your practice strongly. The reason this occurs is that meditation, because it deals with either calming the mind, investigating the nature of the mind, or generating virtuous qualities (such as loving kindness), goes against our usual samsaric conditioning, which is necessarily selfish. When we go against this conditioning, on a sub-conscious level, as things are shifting in the very core of our mind, these kind of situations can arise. There is nothing negative or full of horror about this, because it is actually the negative and ingrained tendencies fighting against the positive practice of meditation.
There are ways to overcome this. The first is to stop the practice when this situation occurs, and engage in deep breathing to calm the mind, as you did. The other is to engage in single-pointed concentration meditation at the beginning your session of loving kindness meditation. This will help calm the internal mind, and also make your practice more focused and stronger. Perhaps you can do this by focusing on your breathing. You do not concentrate on telling yourself to breathe in and out, rather you rest in the awareness that you are breathing, and you concentrate on it.
Another method you can use, is to engage in the meditation during daily prayers. For example you can start off with a Guru Yoga practice such as that of Lama Tsongkhapa, then engage in your meditation. Once you finish, you can engage in Dharma protector practice, which will help to remove unwanted obstacles, and finally complete your session with a completion dedication. This provides a much more rounded meditational experience, and turns your session into something that generates and seals a lot of merit.
You can find a commentary of Lama Tsongkhapa’s daily Guru Yoga practice here: https://www.tsemrinpoche.com/tsem-tulku-rinpoche/me/tsongkapas-daily-practice-video-commentary.html
And you can find the joint practice of the above together with the practice of the Dharma protector Dorje Shugden here: http://www.dorjeshugden.org/practice/diamond-path-a-daily-sadhana-of-dorje-shugden
I hope this helps. Do keep us informed of your meditational experiences.
Thank you.