Making friends with your mind.
The mind is very wild. The human experience is full of unpredictability and emotions. We can’t escape any of these experiences as they makes us who we are. We can train ourselves through meditation to be more open and accepting towards these events and learn the difficulties of life and the ride of our mind. We can become more settled and relaxed amid whatever life brings us.
When something is bothering you — a person is bugging you, a situation is irritating you, or physical pain is troubling you — you must work with your mind, and that is done through meditation. Working with our mind is the only means through which we’ll actually begin to feel happy and contented with the world that we live in. — PEMA CHODRON
WHY MEDITATE?
We do not meditate in order to be comfortable. Meditation teaches us how to relate to life directly, so that we can truly experience the present moment, free from conceptual overlay. We’ve never experienced this very moment before, and the next moment will not be the same as the one we are in now.
The principle of nowness is very important to any effort to establish an enlightened society. You may wonder what the best approach is to helping society and how you can know that what you are doing is authentic and good. The only answer is nowness. The way to relax, or rest the mind in nowness, is through the practice of meditation. In meditation you take an unbiased approach. You let things be as they are, without judgement, and in that way you yourself learn to be. — CHOGYAM TRUNGPA RINPOCHE
In meditation, our thoughts and emotions can become like clouds that dwell and pass away. Good and comfortable, pleasing and difficult and painful-all of this comes and goes. It’s about opening the heart and mind to the difficulties and joys of life. The fruits of this kind of meditation are boundless.
WORKING WITH THOUGHTS
The nature of mind is to think. It’s as natural for the mind to think as it is for the body to breathe, or for the heart to pump blood through the veins. The motivation behind meditation is not to get rid of thoughts, but to train mind to reclaim its natural capacity to stay present. Mind can be placed on an object, or on an experience, and it can stay there.
Our thoughts are no different — they are just like dreams. And we can choose to wake up from them, to reenter the present moment where things are alive and vivid. We can give ourselves an enormous break by learning to let our mind relax, and not grasp and concretize things. We don’t need to hold on so tightly with our mind, or make such a big deal out of our thoughts, or allow our thoughts to take us down some deep, labyrinthine rabbit hole.
If we can loosen the grip of our thoughts, regarding them as dreams, we’ve just made the world and our ability to experience this world evermore larger.
WORKING WITH EMOTIONS
Very often, our thoughts are pretty lightweight. Sometimes these thoughts take you away. Sometimes they don’t. But if you sit longer, the more you sit, then painful memories will come up. Suddenly you are struggling against how you’re feeling and a lot of emotions are involved.
You need to breathe with the emotion; you don’t breathe it away. This isn’t easy, but it’s important that you allow yourself to experience whatever feeling or resistance arises in you.
Over time, when we stay with our emotions and breathe with them, the emotions can morph. Here is where we really develop the understanding that emotions are just energy; we see that emotions are simply energy that we attach our thoughts and stories to.
WORKING WITH SENSE PERCEPTIONS
Meditating on our sense perceptions- hearing, sight, feeling, tasting and smelling- helps us to see that even the littlest things can turn us toward full-blown internal warfare. They can show us how, basically, we cause our own suffering because we allow the most simple sense to bring back a memory that can escalate difficult emotions. They are also and opportunity to enter pleasure, delight or joy.
Locking into a fixed way of seeing things gives us a sense of certainty and security- but it’s false security, it’s false certainty, and ultimately it’s not satisfying.
The satisfaction that we speak comes from recognizing flux and flow and morphing and changing of things, and it comes from the ability to see the organic, true nature of whatever is arising in the present.
OPENING YOUR HEART TO INCLUDE EVERYTHING
One of the many boons of meditation is that it helps us take an interest in our life in a way that is curious and expansive, rather than seeing life’s complexities as a constant struggle.
It’s said that great suffering creates or brings great compassion. You can seize that moment: you can cherish that moment of pain, and rather than letting it harden you in the habitual way and create great suffering, that moment can create great compassion. Instead of hardening into revenge, you shed a tear, and you start going in the direction of love and kindness- for both yourself and others.
We find the love in ourselves. This is the point. Love is not “out there”: it’s not in the relationship, and it’s not in having the “right” relationship. It’s not our career or our job or our family or our spiritual path. On the other hand, if you begin to connect with the fact that you have this good heart, and that it can be nurtured and woken up, than all of that- career, family, spiritual path, relationship, everything- becomes the means for an awakening. Your life is it. There’s no other place to practice.
