Meditation Programme - Why Meditation Is So Hard And Take So Long

Some years ago I saw an advert for a meditation product that promised me that I could meditate like a Zen master and without 25 years of practise several hours a day.

I was sceptical, but interested, and did some research.

Here is a summary of what I found:

The benefits of meditation are fairly well known - the ability to still the mind, develop calmness, deep insight and considerable self awareness, and of course the big one - the "big E" - ENLIGHTENMENT - one day, in 10 million lifetimes, if you are lucky!

I rapidly discovered that the downside to all this is that meditation is simple in theory - but very hard in practise.

For a start it takes considerable discipline and that requires serious motivation.

Then there's the time it takes. 10 minutes twice a week just won't do it. You need to do at least two 30 minute sessions a day EVERY day - as an absolute minimum.

And even more depressing is the elapsed time required to START to see any benefit. It can take months of disciplined persistent (and consistent) practise to start to see any serious lasting benefit.

And even longer for the big juicy benefits - like being able to control your mind, stop your thoughts at will, acquiring deep insights into the nature of oneself and the world "out there" takes many (10+) years of meditation practise.

The underlying reason why meditation is hard and takes so long

In a nutshell the reason why meditation is hard is all to do with evolution - or more precisely, the current stage of the neurological evolution of the "average" or "normal" human brain - which is that (what is conventionally and colloquially referred to as) the "left brain" and the "right brain" do not communicate easily or much at all.

The same is also true for the other 2 major brain centres (conventionally and colloquially referred to as "the emotional centre" and "the reptile brain" or the survival instinct).

The lack of communication between these 4 major brain centres, or to express it another way the lack of brain balance, is the underlying evolutionary and neurological reason why we experience life the way we do, why we suffer so much, and as a species why we inflict so much suffering on each other. It is also the root cause of all of our personal internal conflict and inner resistance or immunity to change.

As a massive simplification and generalisation the average person's brain is just not balanced, i.e. the different centres of the brain literally do not - frequently cannot - communicate.

So improved and more frequent and conscious communication between these different brain centres is the route to peace, insight and all the benefits and other "goodies" quite rightly attributed to meditation.

The reason why meditation takes so long to deliver significant and lasting personal change is because the meditator is, (quite literally) at the physiological level, re-wiring or re-routing the neurological pathways in their own brain. Initially this is primarily between left and right brain, and then from the balance achieved there, between all 4 major brain centres. So meditation is fundamentally a re-programming of the brain.

This may all sound very reductionist, unglamorous and unspiritual, but at a physiological and neurological level when we meditate we are strengthening the corpus callosum - the tissue containing and comprising the neural connections between the left and right brain.

A simplistic developmental analogy of all this is to compare or contrast the "average" or "normal" human brain with a baby, and the brain of the Zen master with an experienced mountaineer. The gap is that wide and the difference is that profound.

It was at this point that I had my own "Grasshopper" moment (you do remember the 70's "Kung Fu" series starring the late David Carradine - don't you?), when I discovered that there is a technology based around binaural beats that can considerably speed up this whole reprogramming process.

And better still, the only effort required is physically putting on headphones and sitting in a chair for 30-60 minutes a day!