Good Meditation and Bad Meditation

There is no good meditation or bad meditation, there is just meditation. It’s like life, you know. Am I having a good life, or am I having a bad life? Actually, it’s just life. Good or bad is something that we judge, according to our standards. You may think “My life is not so good, I want these things that I still haven’t gotten yet”. But somebody living in a poorer part of the world may look at you and say “His life is really good, I wish I had his life.”

Meditation is like that, it’s not that it is good or it’s bad. We may think that we have a good experience or a bad experience, but really, it’s all just practice. It’s is all just part of practice. Good, and, not so important. The most important thing is to keep going.

I talked about the Buddha practicing for six years a couple weeks ago, and we did some math and found out it was about 35,000 hours of meditation. You think in these 35,000 hours he never had a bad experience? In fact we know, this is in the story, the night before he got enlightenment all these demons appeared. Is that a good experience? Or bad experience?

All you have to do is just keep going, whether it feels good or doesn’t feel good. That is not important. The important thing is to continue going. Then you realize that this good feeling or bad feeling is actually what we make. It is not actually anything inherently good or bad about the practice, it is just what we make it. When you start to do that then your meditation gets less attached to good and bad experiences.

Even the difficult experiences will help you as long as you don’t stop, and don’t give up.