Can I Talk Meditation For a Sec?
If I see another image of the golden light of God swallowing up a serene figure, deep in concentration I’m gonna spit! Or peaceful, cross legged humans on the beach, in the mountains, filled with the colors of the 7 chakras….you get the picture? Don’t get me wrong now, a meditation practice can, without a doubt, cultivate deep feelings of peace and interconnectedness. It can elevate non-judgmental love in your life, heal relationships and inspire deep creativity. A meditation practice can mitigate stress and anxiety, support healthy sleep and aid in healing. And this list is hardly complete!
PRETTY, BUT THE REAL WORK HAPPENS IN THE FAILURES…
My problem is that the experience of my meditation practice feels more like a cow flying around in a tornado! Over the course of a single practice, it feels like I’m averaging a thousand thoughts a second, all sorts of feelings that go along with those thoughts and then a bunch of judgements about the fact that I can’t stop being distracted by thoughts. And let’s not even talk about the fly I can hear buzzing around my head and the fact that my foot that has fallen asleep.
The experience that I have in meditation is NOTHING like the images we see…and it is NOT WRONG.
A meditation practice is just that, a practice. Let’s get even more specific…a meditation practice is practicing training your attention to stay in one place, the place YOU choose; not your habits. There is no guarantee that your attention will in fact stay in one place, most likely it will not! When learning how to shoot a basketball, there is no guarantee you will get the ball in the basket, but you keep throwing (practicing) in order to cultivate the skill to increase the chances that you can get the ball to go where you want it…almost every time.
Why is it important to be able to train your attention? Because a distracted, wandering mind does not “see”or “feel” clearly. It is constantly processing some combination of past, present and future and all of the learned behaviors and emotions associated. Really quickly we find ourselves deep in brain physiology and psychology and its all super fascinating…but now is not the time. What I want to express in this moment is that your meditation practice is just that, a practice of training attention.
One of my first teachers explained this to me in very simple terms. “Kid” he said, “Relax. You meditate to change what happens in the other 23 hours of the day, the practice is a bitch”.
It’s not about what happens while you’re “sitting”. It’s what happens in the rest of your life. It’s about training attention to see and feel more clearly; feeding the possibility of deepening feelings of peace and interconnectedness. It’s interested in elevating non-judgmental love and healing in your relationships and finding creativity. It is about mitigating stress and anxiety and supporting healthy sleep.
So relax kid. Stick with it no matter how many times your 5-minute sit feels 100 years of total chaos. Give yourself credit for trying and failing and then do it again the next day. Pay attention to progress and forget about perfection.
