When we decide to learn meditation it is a good idea to have a really clear idea about what we are doing. There is no reason for sitting more complicated than that we feel stressed and unhappy and want to feel better. I think we mostly understand this but when we actually get started, we run into obstacles. These obstacles make it pretty easy for our thinking to fall into the category sometimes called "magical." We imagine pictures of the Buddha looking serene and think that meditating will create serenity. When we don't become serene we either quit or we start looking into techniques and teachers that that we think will work better.
What we don't do is to look into what he actually taught- that life is suffering and that the suffering is caused by desire. We think that we can use meditation to step around suffering. It is the same kind of magical thinking that deludes us into thinking drinking, shopping, watching football games, or God knows what is will diminish suffering. They won't. Suffering is a simple fact of life.
Everything we do, everything, is done in an effort to avoid suffering or increase comfort. It is the purpose of all behavior and the human mind is quite exquisitely attuned to this activity.
When we take up a meditation practice, it makes sense that we do it in a very deliberate way to avoid feeling any more pain. But Meditation is unique in that its purpose is not to avoid suffering but to experience it on a really, really mundane level. When we sit, especially in the beginning, our minds go into overdrive, wondering what in the world we think we are doing. We feel boredom, anxiety, and then one desire after an another. But if we are patient, thoughts drift through out minds and pass away, leaving us to wonder what all the fuss was about.
People are addicted to thinking but meditation is quite distinct from thinking. It is about sitting and feeling the breath and bodily sensations without trying to change them or make them go away. As long as we don't think, there is physical discomfort but there is no problem. The Buddha observed that life has three characteristics. First, it is unsatisfactory. Sitting still is the only way I know to experience a baseline sense of dissatisfaction that is a common human experience not connected to any kind of thinking activity. The second characteristic is impermanence. Things change. We might feel an overwhelming sense of unease one moment that simply vanishes in the next. As long as we don't think about how bad we feel and what we can do to fix it, this is not a problem. It is just discomfort.
When we begin thinking about how bad life is and counting up reasons for why it is that bad, life becomes considerably more difficult. The Buddha's third observation about life, annata. Anatta is the Pali term usually translated as "not self." Annata is actually impossible for the thinking mind to understand because the mind is attuned to identifying cause and effect. I prefer to use the term, "impersonal." Our hunger, thirst, lust, fear, and anger are all completely impersonal energies that we personalize for the purpose of identifying causes and finding cures. Over time we learn to let them be. When we let them be they cease being problems.
Coming to this understanding is quite challenging. The sense of self is central to human identity and most of us have incurred some very intimate wounds that leave a lingering and deep sense of anguish. The deeper the anguish, the more our bodies want to escape the pain. Unfortunately, our solutions hurt ourselves and they hurt the people we love. We can't step around this. We can, slowly and patiently, observe our minds at work, how they become inflamed and then how they calm down. Normal human beings are quite capable of understanding all this. I don't think this requires a lot of instruction. It does require a lot of redirection and encouragement.
Understanding at the deepest level possible that life really is suffering, is paradoxically, liberating. Liberation is quite counter-intuitive. We don't cease to suffer as we reach some transcendent realm. We continue to experience discomfort but we don't personalize it. Our minds become spacious as we cease the war within ourselves and with others, we begin working with those energies in a manner that is different, creative and compassionate. We heal conflict rather than inflicting it. It is that simple.