Our bodies have evolved over a billion years to deal with all kinds of environment changes and challenges. There is genius in here at every level. One aspect of the magic of adaption is that our bodies grow stronger when subjected to challenge, as long as we have time to recover, and some nutrition so we can rebuild.
Think of working out. Going for a long hike, or carrying a load, or dancing for hours, challenges the muscles. We are sore the next day or two days later as we feel the microscopic damage to the tissues. Then the body rebuilds itself stronger. This is what "conditioning" is, strength conditioning. This leads to "being in shape."
When you first take up guitar, or ukelele, or any stringed instrument, your fingertips get very sore. Over time, your fingers build up callouses. This is another form of adaptation.
When our bodies are exposed to a virus, if it is novel to our immune system, at first we don't know we are being invaded. The virus just replicates itself, using our cellular machinery for its own purposes. After awhile, the body realizes, "Hey, that's not ME! That is something else, using my cellular machinery for ITS purposes! And the body generates an immune response. Very often, we are forever after immune to that virus. This is why we never get the same cold twice. There are about 200 cold viruses circulating in the world, and over a lifetime we may get a bunch of them, but is is actually a different virus each time.
Part of taking care of yourself, a fundamental life skill, is making sure you are exposed to enough of life's challenges to keep your emotional immune system challenged, your physical immune system activated, and your mental and spiritual immune systems active and in play. This means you have times of challenge or exposure, and times of rest and recovery.
Meditation is a tool for recovery, because it allows for a rest deeper than sleep, according to decades of physiological research at Harvard Medical School and other centers.
During meditation, the body cycles through waking, dreaming, and deep sleep-like states, adjusting its biochemical balance for each and surveying the adaptive challenges that the organism is facing.
This is why meditation can be so disturbing, because the bodymind system is built to adapt to reality. If there is a life challenge that you are not facing, or are trying to hide from, your meditation instinct will bring it to your attention so you can develop an adaptive response to it, can have the proper immune response to the stress.
This is also why you want to make your meditation as pleasurable, indulgent, luscious, adorable, and inviting as possible. You need that bodily pleasure in order to invite the body into deep restorative, recovery, healing mode. Then when the awareness of stressors arises - all the things in your life that are toxic, or challenging, you can meet them in meditation with all your best resources at hand.
Meditation is inner play, where you are gaming out, like in a video game, the adventure of life with all its allies, enemies, challenges, and obstacles. You can explore this option and that option, and keep on accessing your deepest strengths. In meditation, it is okay to fail again and again, because each time you notice you have failed, each time you think of something toxic or damaging and lose your sense of integrity, you can then go deeper into your inner resources and then come back to face the foe again.
It's desperation that makes us dive deep into the essence of life and get the inner medicine we need, forge the inner alliance. It is always a crisis, on some level, that makes us want to meditate.
Buddha was in a total crisis when he set forth on the path to become the Buddha we know, or have heard from. His first son had just been born and he was so scared that he fled the house in panic, ran away and never went home again. He was driven to go off and starve himself in the forest and try to invent a path through this world. Although he abandoned his family, he did his best to become a kind of good father to the whole human race. Someone who could utter wisdom to guide us. Someone to clear a path and show the way to walk through this world of wonder and terror.
We each have access to our inner Buddha. Your inner Buddha is inside you, inside your crises and challenges.
Meditation has thousands of gateways, thousands of variations. You will know the ones that work for you because after meditation you find that you are more resourceful -- you have the sense, "Oh, I've GOT THIS. I can handle it."
