Whenever I ask people about their experience with meditation, most start off by mentioning that it’s near impossible for them to quiet their minds. As if thinking thoughts with their mind is a major brain defect that they wish they could upgrade and that they’ll inevitably have to overcome in order to attain a mere moment of meditation.
Yet, the essence of mind is thought.
Our minds are great at producing thoughts. What if we could just appreciate them for their first-rate productivity? Applaud them for being so incredibly good at doing exactly what they were designed to do?
We rely on our minds to discern, judge, plan, worry, daydream, ideate, contemplate, assimilate information and remember. These activities are the specific and detailed terrain of mind and we wouldn’t have evolved as far as we’ve gotten without getting so darn good at it. All of this mind-fawning to say, that in my opinion, disdaining any aspect of the pronounced muscle of our minds is just misguided. Especially if we expect to achieve a meditative state by damming up the mind’s natural flow.
I’m now pondering, what if quieting the mind as an approach to meditation has always been a waste of energy?
It’s been my experience, and I offer this experience in hopes that it clears up what for many is a common barrier towards developing a positive relationship with meditation, that the part of us that meditates is not the part of us that thinks. The part of us that can tune into an expanded state of consciousness, that is meditation, is not mind.
Meditation occurs when we align with our seat of awareness. When we rest into the experience of our own inner stillness; the place from which we witness ourselves, our actions and our mind activity. Mind never turns off. It’s always ticking. We just reorient. So in this light, meditation is a practice of decisive re-orientation. We choose to line up with a different aspect of ourselves. And we’ve all experienced it unequivocally when we lose ourselves in a moment of awe over a sunset or become completely engrossed in a favorite activity and lose track of time. These moments sans thought are not an indication that our thought stream has been dammed up. Instead, they are moments when we’re not paying attention to our thoughts, when we’re operating from a different place of orientation and doing so changes our experience of consciousness.
There are myriad tools and practices to help engage this kind of meditative experience from spiritual traditions the world over, but listing or detailing them is not the point of this brief commentary. So I’ll now move on to my second point.
That is, when setting out to meditate, one ought to start out with clear goals.
I say this because I wonder whether another part of what keeps so many people from feeling accomplished as meditators is that they’re simply setting their goals too high.
If you are someone who has been been feeling like a meditation dunce, or whose anxiety gets provoked by attempting to meditate, I’d encourage you to check in with your goals. Chances are you’re not trying to be a monk. So why are you holding yourself to such high standards? Most people think while they meditate. They just don’t stay focused on their passing thoughts as a hindrance.
The majority of folks who want to incorporate meditation into their self-care routines are just trying to enhance their wellness by adding a practice that decreases stress, balances mood and improves mental and physical health and performance. One doesn’t have to become a masterful meditator or an enlightened being to achieve these simple benefits of a regular meditation practice. Ten imperfect, but well-intended minutes in the morning and ten again at night a few times a week will do a body and a mind very, very well. And I made up ten minutes by the way. Your meditation practice can look and happen how you want it to look and happen. You and only you get the privelege of directing how you’d like to establish a spiritual connection with yourself. And by all means seek guidance, find a teacher, but then, you practice. You learn from your experience, from trying it on yourself. And it’s called meditation practice for a reason. It’s the ritual of it, the returning to yourself over and over again, to your intentions, to your care, to your tending the soil of your internal landscape that produces results over time. And to keep going back to it you have to be able to tolerate your imperfections. Sitting with those is part of the package. And remembering that you’re not trying to be perfect leaves more wiggle room to enjoy the journey.
My final note is that once you start to become more familiar with the part of you that witnesses, once you can access that seat of inner awareness more easily because of the consistency of your practice, then life can become part of your meditation practice. You can begin to witness yourself, from your seat of awareness, with humor and compassion, letting all of it arise and letting all of it go, reorienting to each fresh moment as it unfolds.
If you’d like some advice on a personalized approach to meditation that works for you please visit www.caraliguoriwellbeing.com and contact me for a virtual consult. You can also follow me on instagram @caraliguori.wellbeing for more thoughts on body, mind and spirit wellbeing.