Are we nearly there yet?

The sounds of childhood: ‘I’m booooored! Are we nearly there yet?’

The spiritual path is really all about repetition. We do the same meditations every day; in our culture that constantly chases new thrills, this is quite revolutionary. So how do we do this without getting bored?

In my experience, we only get bored with spiritual training when we don’t really get something: when it is intellectual, rather than experiential. I have been to many introductory talks about meditation, where I hear the same things I’ve heard hundreds of times before; but I don’t get bored with being told that happiness is a state of mind, I sit up and go ‘Yes, that’s so true!’ The words mean something to me because they’re backed up by my experience. So if we find ourselves becoming bored with a practice, it’s a sign that we don’t have a deep experience of it yet – in which case, we need to do it more, not follow our boredom away to something else!

Remember that boredom is a delusion, it’s tricking us: there isn’t really something else out there that is going to remove our dissatisfaction. Boredom is a subtle type of anger that will not be content with things as they are. If we recognize this then we can actually use it to help motivate us: our spiritual practice is not a cause of boredom, it’s the only way to stop being bored, because for as long as we have an ordinary deluded mind we will inevitably be dissatisfied by everything. So just sit with it, see how deceptive our dissatisfaction is, and keep on repeating our meditations for as long as it takes.

Take this further: Weekly meditation classes | A calm mind

Thanks to ArtificeBlade for the image.