The Good Sign

Why Difficulty in Meditation Is Not Failure

This essay is drawn from a Dharma Lab conversation with Mingyur Rinpoche, Dr. Richard Davidson, and Dr. Cortland Dahl. You can watch the full talk here.

Most people who try to meditate quit for the same reason. Not because they don’t have time or can’t sit still — but because they try it, feel worse than before they started, and conclude they must be doing something wrong. The mind races. Thoughts pile up. Something that was supposed to bring peace seems to be producing the opposite. And so they put it down, never understanding what they missed.

What they missed is this: feeling worse is often the first sign that something is going right.

You’re Already Doing It

Mingyur Rinpoche asks his students one question before their first breathing meditation: Are you breathing right now? Every hand goes up. “That’s it,” he tells them. “That is the meditation.” Meditation isn’t a special state you have to manufacture — it’s awareness, and awareness is already the natural quality of mind. You are already doing it. The only thing required is to notice.

This cuts against the most common misconception: that meditation demands you empty the mind, seal off past and future, sit in perfect thought-free stillness. As Rinpoche puts it: “Meditation means be present now, no past, no future, no pizza.” And then what happens? More pizza comes. Suppressing the mind only tightens the grip. What practice actually requires is something far lighter: let thought come and go. As long as you still remember a glimpse of breathing, that’s all. That is the meditation.

The Waterfall

When you follow that simple instruction and sit down to practice, something unexpected often happens. Instead of quiet, you encounter a traffic jam — more thoughts, more emotions, more noise than you ever noticed before. It can feel like standing under a waterfall, everything crashing down at once. The natural conclusion: I must be terrible at this.

But here’s what’s actually happening. You haven’t become more distracted. You’ve become more perceptive. The mind was always racing; you’re just now paying attention to it. In Buddhist psychology this has a name — the waterfall experience — and it marks the first genuine step of practice: the shift from being lost in thought without knowing it, to actually seeing it. The moment of noticing is not failure. It’s the whole point.

Rinpoche explains why with an image that’s hard to forget. When you clean a dirty cup, you pour in a few drops of water. At first, it looks more dirty — the grime swirls up, the cup appears worse than before you started. But it hasn’t become dirtier. The dirt is rising to the surface, loosened at last by the water. The mind works the same way. The surge of thoughts and emotions that arrives when you begin to practice isn’t new material — it was always there, churning beneath the surface. What’s new is the awareness, the small clarity that meditation has introduced, which is now illuminating what was already present.

The Monsoon River

There is a second image that approaches the same truth from a different angle. In monsoon season, the rivers of India, Nepal, and Tibet run brown and turbulent. You can look into the water and see nothing — no fish, no depth, no clarity. Then months later, you return to the same river. The rains have passed, the water has settled, and suddenly it is full of fish. They seem to have appeared from nowhere. But they were there all along. The muddy water was simply hiding them.

As the mind begins to clear through practice, we see things we had never noticed before — the texture of our thoughts, the subtle flavors of our emotions, the sheer volume of mental activity that has always been running beneath our days. It can feel like regression. It is, in fact, the first evidence of progress.

This pattern shows up precisely in scientific research. Neuroscientist Richard Davidson has found that anxiety often rises in the first week of practice — sometimes significantly — before falling steadily, with participants reporting meaningfully lower levels by the fourth week. Even more telling: when people rate their own attentiveness before and after a week of meditation, the scores often drop. A 4 out of 7 becomes a 2 or 3. It looks like they’ve gotten worse. But what’s actually happening is that they’re becoming more accurate observers of their own minds. Scientists call this introspective accuracy. You haven’t gotten worse. You’ve gotten more honest — and that honesty is exactly what practice is trying to cultivate.

No More Obstacles

Knowing all of this intellectually doesn’t make it feel any better in the moment. When the restlessness comes, or the dullness, or the racing mind, it still registers as failure. The deepest shift meditation requires is in how you relate to difficulty itself.

The teaching that changes everything: use whatever arises as support for awareness. Don’t fight the experience. Turn toward it. If the problem is sleepiness, meditate on the sleepiness — where do you actually feel it in the body? If the problem is a racing thought, make the thought the object of awareness rather than the obstacle to it. When this shift happens, there are suddenly no more obstacles. Everything becomes workable.

And there is something even deeper available in those difficult moments. Rinpoche describes it as sky and cloud. Experience — thoughts, emotions, dullness, agitation — is like clouds passing through. The awareness underneath it all is like sky. It doesn’t change. When you’re in the difficult periods, you’re not just enduring them — you’re being given a rare opening to connect with the sky itself, the background of the mind that remains steady beneath everything else. Down grows us more.

The Road to Lhasa

Rinpoche describes the journey from Eastern Tibet to Lhasa — across mountains, over passes, through valleys. Constant ups and downs. The “ups” in meditation — sessions where the mind feels clear, open, peaceful — are like gaining altitude: energizing, inspiring, worth appreciating. But they don’t last. The “down” experience always comes: dullness, that flat foggy feeling where you can’t tell if you’re meditating or daydreaming; or agitation, the overthinking and emotional turbulence that surfaces without warning.

The teaching is this: both are getting closer to Lhasa. The down is not a detour. It is the road. And beneath all of it runs a distinction worth holding onto: experience — the states of peace or agitation, clarity or fog — goes up and down, always, even for advanced practitioners. Realization, the deeper understanding of the nature of mind, does not go up and down. Once it arrives, it only grows. You can stop measuring your progress by the quality of any single session. The terrain will always undulate. What matters is the direction of travel.

The Disproportionate Power of Difficult Moments

Difficult periods of practice — even a few moments of staying present with something hard — can be as powerful as long stretches of pleasant, easy sitting. It doesn’t feel that way. But what’s happening beneath the surface is that you are training the mind to relate differently to its own experience: not just a strong emotion, but a strong emotion held in awareness. Not anxiety fled from, but anxiety seen clearly and not collapsed into. You are rewriting the association — so that the difficult experience itself becomes a trigger for presence rather than a trigger for reactivity.

Over time, this is what translates from the cushion into real life. When difficulty arrives in the world — and it will — it no longer simply sweeps you away. It meets something that has been trained. The hard moments in practice are not the interruptions to growth. For many practitioners, they are the growth itself.

This is what meditation really offers. Not escape. Not a mind emptied of thought. Not a permanent state of peace. What it offers is a relationship — intimate, honest, and gradually more compassionate — with your own mind. With your thoughts, your habits, your restlessness, your dullness, all of it, exactly as it is.

That relationship begins, for almost everyone, under the waterfall. It begins with the humbling, clarifying moment of finally seeing the mind as it actually is. That seeing feels like failure. It is the doorway.