Sunday, December 5, 2010

I Can See Clearly Now

I can see clearly now, the rain has gone
I can see all obstacles in my way
Gone are the dark cloudds that had me blind
It's gonna be a bright, bright, bright, bright sun-shiny day

Recorded by Johnny Nash


I think the “secret to my success” can all be traced back to meditation. Meditation opened the doors of self-awareness that gave me faith and the confidence to follow my instincts.

I found the benefits of meditation immediately, and they just keep multiplying exponentially. The time that I spend on meditation I get back a thousand fold in simply being more focused. I’m less likely to lose things, or walk into a room wondering why I’m there, or lose my train of thought. When I do, I recover much more quickly.

I became intrigued by the idea of meditation after reading a newspaper article about how Zen is the training of the “monkey mind”. “Monkey mind” was an extremely accurate description of my mind, constantly jumping from one idea or thought to another. One of my favorite sayings was “I just wish my brain would leave me alone”. The idea of training my mind to not do that sounded wonderful. I picked up a copy of The Idiot’s Guide to Zen Living and discovered a new way of being.

I found out that meditation wasn’t as difficult as I expected it to be, and that it wasn’t as great of a time sacrifice that I was afraid of. Like so many people, I was strapped for time. There are far more obligations and expectations and ideas and desires than a person has time for in a day. “Stop the world, I want to get off!” would go through my head. With meditation, I was able to do just that, for a little while.

One of the assumptions I made about meditation was that it would take too long. I don’t have an hour a day to just sit and do nothing, are you crazy? Well, it’s unreasonable to expect anyone to go from not sitting at all to sitting for an hour. So, like jogging, you build up to it. When my husband started jogging it was for 30 seconds with ten minutes of walking and then another 30 seconds. I started my meditation practice with five minutes a day. I got a kitchen timer, that I still use, and set it for five minutes. I did that for a week, then increased it by five minutes. Eventually I built it up to thirty minutes every day. The book says ideally it should be two thirty minute sessions every day, but I’m happy with one.

Another assumption I made was that I had to sit and say “ommm” out loud. I’m not an out loud kind of person, and that would make me too self-conscious. I don’t say anything to myself. There are numerous tricks to get one to empty your mind, and that’s one of them. Another is to “follow your breath”, but I never really understood what that meant. Another is to count your breaths, from one to ten, and then start over again. All of these are just tricks to get your mind to stop its chatter. I do what seems like the right thing to do, and it changes every day. Some days I try to have no words in my head just at the point of my exhale. Other days I have whatever word or phrase pops into my head, like “fluid and smooth” or “healthy and well”. I think if I tried to follow a formula it would become stale.

The most common assumption I hear from people is that the “can’t meditate”. If you could do it already, you wouldn’t need to practice it! It is extremely difficult to actually empty your mind, I’ve even read that the Dalai Lama says he can’t do it. Well, if he can’t do it, then it’s okay that I can’t do it. If nature abhors a vacuum, it also abhors a vacuum of thought. It’s normal to have a new thought pop into your head just as you empty the old ones out, but the fun thing is all the new thoughts that now have room. I’ve found solutions to problems popping into my head, I believe because I let the old things that didn’t work go.

I see the mind as one of those wind-up toy monkeys with banging cymbals. When I begin my meditation, the monkey is banging furiously. As I sit, the banging gets less and less as my mind winds down. Sometimes it comes to a stop, usually just as the timer is about to go off. Most of the time it just unwinds to a manageable speed, and then I’m not starting my day at wound up as tightly as possible, with the monkey banging in my head.
We start life needing to practice everything. We don’t come out of the womb already aware of how to speak, to walk, to eat with a fork. We have to practice all these things. Somewhere along the line we get the idea that we’re supposed to know everything already. When I look back on my path, I think this happened around the age of fourteen. I thought I was supposed to know everything already. I think I’m not unusual, I bet everybody starts to think that at fourteen. Since it’s not in our nature to automatically know anything, so why should we automatically know how to meditate? Meditation takes practice, just like tying your shoes or learning the alphabet. I think this made sense to me because of need ing to practice the violin every day. If I don’t do that, I start to play badly. Now I find that if I miss meditating, I think badly.

If this sounds intriguing, I recommend you try it for a week. Five minutes a day for a week. You won’t empty your mind, but you’ll probably feel more focused and relaxed as you start the day. I would be very interested to hear of anyone else's experiences, feel free to leave a comment!

No comments:

Post a Comment