As a long-time meditation practitioner, I marvel from time to time why meditation is so surprisingly hard to establish.
I get why daily workout is hard. It's work. It makes you sweat. You have to suffer for the good bits. I find myself doing streaks of daily workout, which then get interrupted by work stress, sickness or a few days of low energy - and then weeks of just nothing. Then I get terrible back aches, and I get back into the habit (unless the back ache makes it completely impossible, which sadly only occurs more frequently with age).
Even nofap... on the surface it seems like it's just "doing nothing", but to resist your urges and go against the spur of the moment - I think this is quite an activity. There is an effort.
But meditation, qi-gong, breathing deep and with intent - all of those are next to no work. You don't have to do hours and hours either. Just sit in your bed for 10 minutes each day. Still... there always seems to be an excuse.
I meditated an hour each day before work, for a year. It was good, but I stopped doing it because I found out that sleep is actually more important. I meditate (informally) each night before bed anyway. So why not just sit up, fold my hands (which I know from experience is a good thing), and turn it into formal meditation? Just a few minutes each night.
Just thinking about it, already calms me down.
This is an honest question, by the way. I'm not being rhetorical here. I've heard the same experience from a few people. I'm actually more fascinated by this, than I am complaining about it. It makes me wonder what is going on there.
The same with breathing deep. I need to make time for that, remind myself of it, make a conscious effort. My body never simply does it all on its own. It never became a habit.
Somehow, insanely useful, insanely simple, almost effortless practices have a weird tendency to fall by the wayside for seemingly no reason.
The buddhist explanation is that the monkey mind just doesn't want to shut up. I don't believe in buddhism, but I think that there might be some anxiety around being completely "alone" with your own mind. That there really is an ego-part that is afraid it might vanish in silence. All the things that you hide even from yourself, might crop up when you close your eyes and just sit. All the fears might take a hold of you. Our stories might be the only thing that keeps us from disappearing.
However, as i said, I have been meditating for years. My own experience tells me that this never ever happens. It never feels anything but blissful. So why does experience - personal, up close, real experience - never trump that resistance?
Source: r/Joyful_Chastity
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