Meditative experiences can be compelling and captivating. Certain meditative experiences, like the sign, can serve as indicators of your current degree of concentration. And what you experience does matter a lot in some spiritual practices. Because of these factors, it’s easy to get hung up on what you’re experiencing (or not experiencing) when you’re doing concentration meditation.
When I notice this is happening, I find it helpful to remind myself that fundamentally, concentration is about how you attend, not what you experience. At a basic level, in concentration practice, what you experience is irrelevant. No sign? No bliss? Having a bad day? Embedded in the subject-object framework? Don’t worry about it… if concentration practice is what you’ve chosen to do in a particular meditation session, just do the practice. Don’t try to force any particular experience to happen.
Use introspection to notice how you’re attending. What’s your attention doing? Are you able to rest your attention on your chosen object, or are you distracted? Are you experiencing your chosen object vividly and continuously, or is your experience dull and interrupted? These things are way more important than what you may (or may not) be experiencing.
Photo Passing Storm by Jonathan Combe is used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.