1. Staying with What is Difficult

Staying with What Is Difficult 

Meditation on a difficulty: 

• Bring to mind a current difficulty or open to a difficulty that is already present in your experience right now. This could be a physical pain, a worry, a regret, perhaps some unresolved emotional or interpersonal issue which still has resonance in this moment.
   
• Tune into the physical sensations in the body where the problem is most strongly felt. This could be an actual pain or discomfort or it could be the place where tensing or bracing is occurring or where there is a “felt sense” of the emotion being experienced. Bring attention to this, and if possible, breathe into this area on the in breath and out from that area on the out breath.
   
• Without trying to make the unpleasant experience go away, bring a sense of acceptance, curiosity and befriending to what is there. We can say, “What is this? Let’s see what is here. It is here already so I might as well feel it and be open to it”. Soften and open up around the difficulty, giving it space and allowing it to reveal itself. Hold it in awareness. Gradually, return to the breath and broaden awareness to the body as a whole and open to a fuller sense of being present.

Working with difficulties: 

• Whether we are focusing on the body scan, mindfulness of movement, sitting meditation or merely observing the activities of our everyday lives, we will be aware that we frequently encounter experiences that we may find difficult or unpleasant. This could be a physical discomfort or pain. It could be the knowledge that a part of our body is not working as it should be. It could be a problematic memory, worry or concern about something going on in our lives currently. It could be an unpleasant emotional experience or state that we are struggling with. Usually, it will be something we do not like and we wish would go away!
   
• Our relationship with the difficulties in our lives is an important contributor to how much we suffer. In fact, it could be said that the majority of our suffering is caused by our reaction to the difficulty. First there is the difficulty, say a pain in the back, then there is our reaction to this – we don’t like it; we want it to go away; we tell ourselves it is not fair; we tell ourselves that it will spoil our evening; we tell ourselves that we are always going to be struggling with this; we tell ourselves that we hate this pain that is ruining our lives!
   
• We may notice how we tense around the difficulty, physically, emotionally and mentally. We brace ourselves, or else we may develop a stance of resignation and defeat around it. On the whole, our attitude is one of non-acceptance and aversion. We don’t want to accept the situation we are in – we want to resist it, fight against it, or push it away! This may be a useful stance against many external problems which we can resolve through active problem-solving (we can go and tell the neighbour to turn off the loud music, or if that fails, we can consider going to the police or housing association). However, when it comes to our internal experience, trying to make an experience go away, often merely leads to suppression and frustration.
   
• With mindfulness practice, we can bring awareness to our reactivity to difficult experience. We can notice the non-acceptance and aversion in our experience: the resisting, tensing, bracing, numbing, the pushing away - however it feels to us. We can notice how this does not make the problem go away, and how it increases our suffering. Suffering is the attitude of non-acceptance, along with the original difficulty or pain.
   
• We can practice developing a stance of accepting what it there (that does not mean that we have to like it), and learning to soften around the problem, opening to it, and allowing it to be there. Just as in the Three Minute Breathing Space, we can say, “It’s OK. Whatever it is, it is OK. Let me feel it”, or “It is here already, so I might as well allow it to be here”. We can stop fighting, and let go of the reactive part we play in turning a difficulty into suffering.
   
• Can we treat all of our experiences like guests arriving at a Guest House, as in Rumi’s poem? What about the death of a child, the news of a life-threatening illness, acknowledgement that we can never make up for the losses we may have experienced in a traumatic childhood? Can we open up to these as well, without getting lost in feelings of anger, resentment or despair? Can we “meet them at the door arriving and invite them in”? This is where we often need to speak of Radical Acceptance.