Ayurveda for Meditators: Challenges to Overcome in Your Practice
Do you meditate restlessly? Having trouble focusing? Instead of meditating, do you find yourself busy making lists or daydreaming? It’s not just you.
A daily meditation practise can be challenging for many people to start and keep up.
On the meditation cushion, there are numerous typical difficulties that derail commitment and thwart motivation. This is a perfectly natural stage of the practise of meditators. However, there is hope for overcoming problems thanks to an understanding of Ayurvedic Medicines in kuwait.
Clear Vision: Increasing Sattva
Ayurveda places a strong emphasis on balancing the doshas of vata, pitta, and kapha as well as encouraging the path of improved mental clarity—of enhancing sattva—in order to maintain health and prevent disease.
According to Ayurveda, the sattvic state of the mind is its natural state, and a sattvic mind is a mind that is conducive to meditation. However, because the state of the mind is directly impacted by dietary and lifestyle choices, the mind’s natural sattvic condition frequently becomes obscured or confused by other energies.
Diet based on Ayurveda
You’ve probably noticed, for instance, that some foods make you feel alert and energised while others make you feel sleepy and lethargic. Or how some TV programmes make you laugh and feel relaxed while others make you feel restless and irritated. The decisions we make affect the psyche.
According to Ayurveda, simple seasonal living techniques that balance the three doshas and strengthen sattva will help you overcome common meditation difficulties.
Therefore, making dosha-balancing and sattva-boosting decisions with expertise has a direct impact on the ease, clarity, and steadiness of the mind, which supports your daily meditation.
Let’s examine the traditional five obstacles to meditators and consider how the doshas relate to them to better understand how Ayurvedic lifestyle might contribute to the creation of a more ideal environment for inner serenity and clarity.
5 Typical Barriers to Mediation
The five primary challenges to meditation are listed by the Buddhist tradition. These difficulties impede the meditator from practising proper meditation.
These obstacles inhibit relaxation and concentration by diverting the attention from the current moment.
Long-term meditators may have difficulty developing the deeper levels of compassion, insight, and wisdom that meditation can bring if these barriers continually interfere with their practise. Very annoying and detrimental!
The following are the five typical barriers to meditation:
Grasping, seeking, or desiring: daydreaming, a sweet tooth, travel-related thoughts, or sensual wants. Images, visions, and cravings for pleasurable things divert the mind.
Aversion or malice: critical self, lack of desire to meditation, general agitation, irritation with others. The mind is diverted by thoughts and emotions about undesirable things.
Fidgeting with positioning and props, restless body, itching, scratching, busy mind, planning mind, and mental list-making are all signs of restlessness. Constant motion disorients the mind, making it difficult to be still and in the present.
Sloth or torpor is characterised by drowsiness, exhaustion, a lack of motivation, confusion, difficulty concentrating, a sluggish body, and slouching. Lethargy or grogginess cause the mind to become distracted, making it difficult to remain focused.
Skepticism, uncertainty, cynicism, wondering if one is “doing it right,” and concern over the value of meditation are all examples of doubt. Apprehension causes the mind to become disengaged, making it difficult to focus and be present.
Which obstacles have you recently encountered? Even if we frequently run into the same obstacle, every one of us will inevitably run into one at some point. Even if it’s challenging to entirely remove the obstacles, identifying the one(s) that keep you from meditation the most frequently can help you prevent it from happening again in the future.
The 5 Obstacles and Elevated Doshas
Let’s compare the five obstacles to meditation to the exalted or vitiated states of Ayurveda’s three doshas now that we’ve identified them. Following are a few typical irritants that manifest when the doshas are agitated:
Vata: ungroundedness, fear, uneasiness, a disorganised thinking, restlessness, a fidgety body, difficulties concentration.
Pitta characteristics include impatience, irritability, aggression, hostility, aversion, malice, and hot-headedness.
Kapha: lack of drive, drowsiness, lethargy, hazy thinking, lack of clarity, stubbornness.
Wow! Take note of how these heightened doshas mirror the list of obstacles to meditation.
The natural sattvic mental state that facilitates meditation is blocked or obscured when the doshas are high, which adds to the difficulties to meditation. The five obstacles are triggered or intensified by the doshas when they are out of harmony.
This is significant because, by removing obstacles and enhancing a state of sattva, dosha-balancing diet, lifestyle, and self-care practises can significantly improve your meditation practise.
The 5 Obstacles and the Maha Gunas
The maha gunas of Ayurveda also have a significant impact on what emerges during meditation. Due to their greater impact on the mind than the doshas, these three subtle energies are most prominent in Ayurvedic psychology.
You already know about sattva, and it rarely gives meditators any trouble. But because they are prone to imbalance and disruption, rajas and tamas are frequently referred to as the “doshas of the mind.” These mental instances of all three show how rajas and tamas might develop when they are exalted or vitiated.
Sattva qualities include clarity, harmony, balance, ease, and inner peace. Insight and awakening are supported by this calm mental state.
Rajas are described as being overstimulated, frantic, restless, whirling, moving too quickly, and hyperactive. Rajas causes the mind to become chaotic, agitated, and overexcited when it is disturbed.
Tamas are the Indian words for inertia, apathy, torpor, destructiveness, and idleness. Tamas causes the mind to become dull, uneducated, and indolent when it is disturbed.
Again, wow! Observe how heightened rajas and tamas resemble the obstacles to meditation.
Increased rajas can cause desire, malice, and restlessness. Additionally, having too many tamas might cause drowsiness, torpor, and uncertainty. Ayurveda recommends minimising excess rajas and tamas while actively strengthening sattva in order to develop a regular and intense meditation practise.
How Ayurveda Can Improve Your Mediation
The goal of the meditation path is to open our eyes to the true nature of reality, our interconnectivity, and our own true nature. Unfortunately, the obstacles are substantial barriers to that awakening, particularly when meditators become bogged down in a pattern of endlessly battling the obstacles.
Even though it can be challenging to entirely conquer obstacles, it can be helpful to look at and deal with obstacles as they appear because doing so develops present awareness, self-control, and mindful awareness.
The body-mind typically feels more at ease, balanced, and harmonious when the doshas and gunas are in harmony.
Therefore, meditators have a significantly better chance of sitting comfortably, relaxing, committing to the meditation technique of choice, and improving concentration—thereby boosting clarity, compassion, insight, and wisdom—by reducing the obstacles with appropriate diet, lifestyle practises, and Ayurvedic self-care techniques.
Ayurvedic practises can significantly enhance the meditation experience and journey, regardless of the path, school, or lineage a person is exploring.
Decide for yourself whatever obstacle you encounter the most frequently while meditating, and then link that obstacle to the elevated dosha or maha guna that best matches that obstacle
After that, decide whatever Ayurvedic techniques you prefer to balance that dosha, and over the ensuing weeks and months, observe how your daily meditation practise evolves. I hope your adventure is successful!
