The meditator's disease

Wanting to gain more understanding of why I suffered so much on this retreat, and why I made no progress in my jhana practice, I googled "long meditation retreat". The top hit of any relevance was a blog by someone who is planning to be in retreat for all of 2012. It appears that this blogger practices in a different tradition than the Theravadan Buddhist tradition I practice in. He points to a page on lung (pronounced loong), the meditator's disease.

Basically, lung is stress. There is nothing surprising or new in this web page. However, it is reassuring to see that my affliction is a recognized difficulty with a name and a recommended remedy (relaxing and easing up on the effort). It's remarkable, but perhaps not surprising, that my teacher, a world-renowned meditation master who has taught many, many stress-prone Westerners, did not recognize this and offer useful advice. His only advice for my affliction of facial tension while meditating was to be sure to place my focus closer to the lip rather than right on the nostrils. He had no advice for my aversion to the practice, except to continue practice.

The article states,

Geshe Rabten thought all Westerners have tsog lung (chronic heart lung). After he spent a year leading a calm abiding retreat for Westerners, Gen Lamrimpa said to us that he thought Westerners could never learn to meditate: Our minds are too fast because we grew up with machines and computers. In other words, we all have chronic low-grade anxiety or tsog lung. It is so ubiquitous that we think it is normal. There is an epidemic of depression and anxiety in modern industrialized society that is growing rapidly, even among children. Our lifestyle gives us lung. This same source of most of our health problems is also what causes us to have a difficult time in meditation retreats ….

While I was on retreat, I frequently reflected on the lifestyle I had retreated from, and it was more clear to me than ever that it is a lifestyle filled with completely unbalanced busy-ness. Even when we think we are relaxing, we tend to be busy. My passion during this time of transition back to regular life is to find ways to step out of the busy-ness. It is hard; there are a million pressures to be busy. Being un-busy can look like being antisocial (because one is not attending parties or participating in the compulsive chatter that passes for lively conversation) or irresponsible (because one is not joining committees or boards of directors, or keeping abreast of current events, or recycling or freecycling every possible item).