Why Your Meditation Practice Is Not Working

The entrepreneurs and executives who attend my talks and come to my workshops are successful people. Virtually all of them report feeling stress in their lives, and this has both increased in the recent past and continues to increase.

Many have started a meditation practice.

One student, let’s call him Joe, was puzzled. He started meditating for twenty minutes each morning. He increased this to thirty minutes and then thirty minutes twice a day. “I feel good when I meditate, Professor Rao,” he told me. “But it has had practically no impact on my life. I am so tense that my muscles knot and I have difficulty going to sleep. Why is this? I thought you recommended meditation as the best way to relieve stress.”

I told him about Paul, the investment banker who bought a farm.

Paul was a successful banker and a numbers guy. He measured everything. He calculated how much to pay a new CEO for companies he bought and what the return on this would be. He knew how much it cost to have potted plants in the lobby of his office building and estimated that they paid for themselves by increasing employee satisfaction a tiny, tiny bit.

He bought a vegetable farm on arid land. It was not yet a farm, but he intended to make it one and grow carrots, tomatoes, cabbages and cauliflowers. And potatoes. He figured he would have enough to eat healthy all year and have a surplus he could sell or give to a local charity.

There was an irrigation channel close by that had an unusual revenue model. It sold water by the hour. He measured the flow rate of water in the channel and estimated that one hour a day would be more than sufficient for his vegetable garden. He arranged for this and left leaving a grizzled old timer in charge.

The farm produced no vegetables, and the old timer told him there wasn’t enough water.

“There is more than enough,” he insisted. “I calculated it myself.”

“Come and see for yourself,” the old timer said.

So, he did.

One hour’s worth of water from the irrigation channel went into the diversionary canal that led to his farm. The land was so arid that the canal itself absorbed all the water. None of it reached the vegetables.

“One hour is just not enough,” explained the old timer. “You have to let the water flow and flow and flow till it irrigates the seeds I have planted.”

And that was Joe’s dilemma. That was the reason his meditation sessions did nothing to reduce his stress or bring calm to his life.

He had a demanding job, and his mental chatter was in such overdrive that the time he spent in quiet contemplation made no difference.

What can you do if you are in a similar situation? How can you let the water flow and flow and flow?

I will tell you next week.

Peace!