The Meditator's Dilemma: An Innovative Approach to Overcoming Obstacles and Revitalizing Your Practice

Through time-tested teachings and exercises, The Meditator's Dilemma shows you how to deepen your meditation practice while cultivating ease and delight—for both beginners and longtime practitioners.

When practiced regularly, meditation naturally deepens self-awareness and leads to spiritual transformation. In our hyper, instant-gratification culture, however, most people miss out on those powerful outcomes because it's hard to commit to a longterm practice. Despite the increasing popularity of mindfulness and its documented mental health benefits, the silent majority of meditators struggle to maintain a regular practice. In fact, research indicates that more than fifty percent of meditators give up on the practice. This is the elephant in the meditation room.

The Meditator's Dilemma, written by a psychologist with forty years' experience practicing and teaching meditation, confronts this problem and its causes and provides specific, accessible techniques and exercises that greatly enhance everyday meditation practice. Bill Morgan's teachings and guided meditation exercises are designed to generate the all-too-missing delight and enjoyment in meditation.

The concept of the "holding environment," central to positive outcome in psychotherapy, is the raison d'etre for these techniques. In psychotherapy, the holding environment comprises the trusting, secure, empathic milieu created by the caring therapist. An indirect benefit of these techniques is the capacity to create a nurturing safe space in any relational context: with a mentor, in a conversation with a dear friend, or in a beautiful natural setting. When we are in a holding environment, we feel alive, connected, and relaxed. The Meditator's Dilemma teaches Western meditators to cultivate an internal holding environment that results in an attitude of relaxed curiosity and exploration toward their meditation practice, leading to greater success and staying power.

BILL MORGAN is a Boston-area clinical psychologist and founding board member of the Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy (IMP). He graduated from Tufts University in 1975 with a degree in Eastern Studies and earned his PsyD from the Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology in 1990. Over the past fifteen years, he has taught residential mindfulness retreats for mental health professionals and caregivers at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies in Barre, Massachusetts, Vallecitos Mountain Ranch in New Mexico, Esalen in California, and Wonderwell, a Tibetan Buddhist center in New Hampshire. He is a contributor to the 2005 book Mindfulness and Psychotherapy (Guilford).