When I still were at university I had the following quote: “When meditation goes well, everything else goes well”; I had perceived a tendency, in those periods of times in my life where my meditation was in good shape, practicing constantly and diligently, everything seemed to turn into my favor, everything seemed to work properly, like some kind of magic formula. And yet, when my practice tumbled, the layout of difficulties and frustrations returned to me in different aspects of my life.

So, What’s the existing correlation between my meditation and everything else?, It is an external force that influence in everything that happens to us?… we have no means to determine it, but we can say it is very probable that this influence come from no other source than ourselves, what we do and how we react to the day by day situations. A diligent meditation is an indication that our mind is well focus or directed, and if the mind is well focus we can extrapolate it to the other activities we do. The reason why everything went better when practiced diligently in my meditation is related with the fact that in those times the damaging emotional load is weaker than usual, meaning less distracting and blinding elements disrupting our relation with life; The will power is significantly stronger, we are able to do what it takes in the right moment, in part because we don’t have to deal, for example, with the procrastination (deriving from toxic mental states) or even in the those cases where such mental states arrives, we are set with the correct tools to overcome them.

In contrast when the meditation practice is not doing so well we can perceive the contrary, our mind is not well focus (but distended), we probably going to be more susceptible to unbalanced emotions deriving from one or more of the five obstacles (aversion, desire, doubt, restlessness or sloth); those states affecting our meditation (or the lack of) can extrapolate to those other aspect of our life degenerating in negative or unsatisfactory results.

Therefore, whenever I said to myself “When meditation goes well, everything else goes well” I wasn’t saying anything absurd at all, it wasn’t even superstition; certainly there’s a connection, and this is how our interior can have a direct effect in the external, if our inner practice is strong, then the external issues will begin to work, since we are the responsible force of our own failure or success, and still in those cases where we don’t have any control of the outcome, if we can accept them internally, it will contribute to a more faster and positive overcome of it and it will help us to be more happy and fulfilled, in other words, we will be less conditioned.

So if you’re having problems with your meditation practice and there’s also other things that concern you, try to break the inertia, turn the Dharma wheel by applying the right effort, and when you make it those other things that concern you will start to solve out in almost an autonomous and incomprehensible way; just try it!.

~Ryokan