Sit and Meditate

Morning sun hitting the Zebra Jasper.

I wanted to share with you some of my thoughts on meditation and some practical ideas for helping with it, if it's something you're interested in bringing into your life (and if you already meditate). I get frustrated when I read some meditation blogs and web pages and see how complicated people can make the process. It really is very simple. Perhaps that is where the complexity lies, that we just can't deal with that level of simple.

A full breath cycle, watched with full awareness, is meditation. It is that simple. The hard part is sitting still in that space, holding that space, concentrating on the breath cycle, over and over and over again. We want to move. Our mind screams at us and flatly refuses to concentrate on the breath. It wants to think about what's for dinner, or that movie we saw last night, or about the washing that needs to be brought in, the floors that need to be vacuumed and the bills that need to be paid. And the body, well the body doesn't want to sit still any more than the mind does. It wants to fidget, it wants to get up and move, it demands that you move and plays all sorts of tricks on you to get you to move. You suddenly get an itch, that you simply must scratch. Your nose decides to drip, goodness knows you can't let that happen. Your legs scream at you that they will go numb, and then they actually do start to go numb - you can't possibly sit through that.

Actually, you can.

I suspect a lot of would-be meditators give up out of frustration that they're not doing it 'right' when all these sorts of things happen. That it's not turning out how the book/webpage/teacher said, that this supposed blissful meditative state is anything but blissful and that there is something wrong with what they're doing, or they just can't do it. Which is very sad, because in reality, these things happen to everyone. The trick is simply to just be aware of it, and come back to the meditation, every single time.

Every time the mind wanders to think about the washing, there is a moment when your awareness tells you - oh, my mind has wandered, I'm not focused on my meditation at the moment, I'm thinking about the washing. This point, where you become aware of the wandering mind, this is the point where you strengthen your meditation, by going back to the meditation (whatever the focus of the meditation may be). And that is a wonderful thing! That is a new moment of awareness, of choosing to notice the mind wandering, and simply bring it back to the meditation. And this can happen over, and over, and over, and over and over. And that is a meditation. And that is perfect. You can think of the meditation like sitting at a train station, watching trains (thoughts) come and go, and letting them come and go, without worrying about them or getting attached to them. Just keep coming back to the meditation.

And the body, when it tells you that it simply cannot sit still, when every cell of your body wants to move, even just a little bit, that is another beautiful place to build awareness and stillness. Because every time it comes up, where you feel you must move, have to move, but choose instead to sit still anyway, that is strengthening the stillness of meditation. Stillness begins in the body, not the mind, so allowing the stillness to strengthen is an important aspect of meditation. If you simply notice the itch without scratching, what happens? Eventually it disappears. If you nose drips, what happens? Our hygienic programming tells us all sorts of things, but at the end of the day, it doesn't matter. And if our legs go numb, get pins and needles, what happens? Well, they get pins and needles. You might have to sit for a few minutes more when you come back out of the meditation, give them time to recover, but nothing else happens.

This is not a post about actually doing a meditation, this is simply my thoughts and experience about the process of meditation. There's this idea that you have to have a 'quiet mind' and that if you don't, you're not doing it right. And that's such an unrealistic expectation to hold. Some days, the mind will wander and chatter and jump all over the place, and that's ok. And some days the body will want to fidget, will find strange aches and pains, will refuse to sit still, and that's ok too. And on some other days, the mind is less active, calmer, quieter, and that's ok. And some days the body loves it, wants to sink into the meditation, finds so much peace in sitting still, and that's ok too. My own experience is that the days of calmer mind and peaceful body are more frequent the longer you do the practice (I'm talking a long time, a lot of years). But even then, there are times when the mind races and the body fidgets. It's called being human, and the only thing that makes a meditator is the ability to sit with that, accept it and not attach to any of it. Sometimes, the greatest insights come from the busy mind/fidgety body days.

There is only one thing that makes a meditation a good one for me - and that is simply doing it. Whatever happens in that meditation is not the point. Sitting, showing up, doing the meditation, that is the point.