Mindfulness Meditation

Sit cross-legged. Close your eyes. Make sure you feel relaxed. Try as hard as you can to be peaceful. Say “ommmmmmmmm”. Think only thoughts of peace, love and positivity.

Nope…no need to do any of those things during mindfulness meditation.

The stereotypes are usually what trip people up, so best to get them out of the way right off the bat. The truth is, mindfulness meditation isn’t about making anything in particular happen. It’s getting used to allowing whatever is already happening in this moment to happen, without feeling like you have to do something to change it. It’s getting comfortable with right now…which truthfully is the only moment you’ll ever find yourself in. Has anybody ever actually been in the past or the future? We’re always looking to them as places where we can go to find answers, solutions, salvation…but the truth is, you’re always only ever in this moment, and those places called “past” and “future” have never really been seen by anybody. So why put your eggs in those imaginary baskets? Mindfulness meditation is about getting comfortable with what you already have. This one moment, which you always exist in, is already the way it is. The more you deny that, the more you suffer. The more you accept it, the more you are in touch with the truth… and then you come to understand, appreciate and value things. You start to cooperate with life as it is. And your moment-to-moment experience becomes a lot simpler, a lot easier, and a lot less painful.  

Sounds straightforward enough, right? So why do people find it so incredibly hard to meditate?

Let’s think about this for a second. Meditating isn’t actually hard, is it? The whole point of it is to do absolutely nothing. Meditation isn’t even really something you do; it’s simply setting aside time to NOT do. How can doing nothing be hard? It doesn’t demand anything of you whatsoever; it might be the only thing in the world that doesn’t. So shouldn’t it be the easiest thing in the world, really?

Well, now imagine that you didn’t have a mind. You didn’t have a voice inside your head running your life all the time. Meditation, or just being and not doing, would be the easiest and most natural thing in the world then, wouldn’t it? Aha - so the trouble with meditation lies in your mind. The truth is, it’s your mind that’s always telling you that there’s something you have to do. That you have to DO something in order to BE something. And the real trouble comes from the fact that you tend to believe whatever your mind says, no matter how blatantly wrong it is. Your mind tells you nobody’s going to like you at the party tonight, that it'll be a disaster? You believe it…your body reacts as though you're totally threatened...it goes into fight-or-flight... which makes you believe it even more… and then you don’t go. Yet absolutely none of that was based in reality. It became your reality when you listened to your mind, believed in the initial assumption. How much of your life is like that? Have you ever faced a situation you find so difficult that others find so easy, and just wished you were fearless? Well the truth is, nobody is fearless. It’s how much they believe their fear that makes the difference between relaxed people and anxious people.

Now, imagine sitting down, just you and your mind, and getting used to hearing what it’s saying without believing it. Imagine getting used to feeling the way your body reacts to your incorrect mind, and recognizing that’s all it is – you don’t need to act on it, to fix anything, because there’s actually nothing to solve. So you can relax. Just let it be there. Slowly but surely, your thoughts, your emotions, they lose their power over you. It’s not that you don’t have them anymore; they’re just not a problem anymore. You see clearly that they’re truly baseless, and so you become free to act in a way that aligns with the truth, rather than being a prisoner to your out-of-touch mind and body. You start to see that you can find peace with whatever what you face, having this orientation towards life; because the truth is, nothing that happens in this moment is really a problem. Only your mind interprets it that way, and you have the opportunity to start practicing how to not listen to it. How to let it be.

That opportunity lies in practicing mindfulness meditation…in practicing “not doing”.

For those of you who are interested in giving it a try, I’ve found Jon Kabat-Zinn’s “Wherever You Go, There You Are” to be incredibly well-written, insight-provoking and helpful. Highly recommend it - best guide I've read so far. I also find www.wildmind.org has some helpful information, for those looking to learn more or start now (or start without having to purchase a book ;-)

xo Janine