Focus Disruption in Meditation

The focus for meditation differs from person to person depending on the level of practice and on the objective intended. One common incidence is the scattering of focus where the person finds that he or she is removed from the focus and is induced to hone in on something else.

 Why does this happen?

What causes this?

Why is this repeated again and again, day after day, no matter if the person has some sessions in which the focus remains as desired?

Why does one regress repeatedly during meditation?

This article is about identifying the power which causes the defocus and which forcibly removes the core-self from what is intended as the focus of a meditation session.

First of all a student should do whatever is possible and what actually gives full or partial results in resisting the defocusing energy. I use pranayama practice and inner detachment which developed over years by doing meditation practice and struggling to bring the mind to order.

What do you use?

Some use mantras.

Some use breath tracking.

Some use visualization

Some have other methods.

Whatever it is, provided it gives partial or full results, one should implement it and improve its effectiveness day after day. One may change the methods as well.

Consider a whale, a large aquatic moving about in the ocean, going in a certain direction as it intended. Imagine however that somehow it found itself in a shallow gully at low tide. It has no idea how it got into the gully. It realized that it was in the gully when it found that it could not swim on mud. Because of the shallowness, it was forced to realize that it lost its way and was in an unwanted place.

Naturally it will make efforts to get out of the gully, but will the endeavor be successful or will it simply remain stranded?

How will it get back to the ocean?

Does it remember its objective?

If it does not recall the objective, what will it do instead?

If it remembers the objective, will that cause it to resume the journey?

When one sits to meditate, one does so with a certain energy content. This content is itself for or against the practice. If the content at the time of meditation is supportive of the practice, the yogi will have a good session and will be happy after it. If however the content is against the practice, the yogi will struggle to keep the intended focus and will find that he is removed repeatedly from the focus. Somehow or the other, He is induced to engage in some other focus.

The question is not how to resume the focus or how to banish the negative energy. The question is:

What is the content?

How did that develop in the psyche in the first place?

The content is caused by one’s lifestyle which includes the people whom one associates with and the physical and psychic activity one participates in. If one can change the lifestyle which causes that type of content, the problem would be solved.

Can the yogi do this?