Why am I hitting a wall in meditation?
Hi!
I've been meditating on and off for years. I've done long stretches of 20-40 minutes a day, the longest I've done in one sitting is around an hour.
I used to feel clear-headed after meditating, and a lot of the time I would come back to reality with a clearer sense of what I needed to do next in life, and a sense of discipline to get it done. Sometimes I would feel like I was floating, or expanding, or spinning in multiple directions at once.
The idea I had of meditation was that the more I did it, the deeper I went into the experience of consciousness, that things were supposed to be revealed to me. And yes I recognize that this desire defeats the purpose, but also that I can't suppress or deny it so I have to walk that middle ground.
Whether the revelation is something spiritual, knowledge of the universe, or just repressed emotions in my brain. But after a certain point it felt like I wasn't seeing anything at all. I just hear my breath, and see the red of light behind my eyelids, and feel my foot falling asleep. And it doesn't feel like there's anything more to see, because all I'm doing is just breathing with my eyes closed.
To describe it differently, it feels like my consciousness isn't opening up to anything, it's pressing against a wall. And if there's some clear-headedness in an adjacent plane of existence, it doesn't feel like it's something I can reach through the mechanism of focusing on my breath.
I do have a total and consistent sense practically 24/7 that I'm not clear-headed. Like even my own emotions and memories are blocked off from me. And I do what I can to try to be clear-headed but nothing works. I thought meditation was supposed to help with things like that.
So I stopped a few months ago, just because it didn't feel like it was doing anything for me anymore.
Is this the lesson meditation teaches you? That you actually can't solve all the problems in your life through breath focus? Or am I just doing it wrong?
Is consciousness really the foundation of reality?
If everything is one, how can the illusion of separation even arise?
Why does the universe have one specific shape out of the infinite shapes it could have had?
Throwing those out there in case some modern Buddha happens across this haha