by Ramsey Margolis • onemindfulbreath.org.nz/ramsey-margolis
It takes an awful lot of effort to wake up as a human being. It’s far, far easier and much simpler to sleepwalk our way through life than to wake up. Nowadays though, with Covid-19 and the looming climate crisis, we’re all having to question how we live our lives. And that’s probably why you’re here, now, reading these words on your phone, tablet or computer.
The Scottish psychiatrist RD Laing is said to have written that human beings are afraid of three things: death, other people, and their own minds. While it’s true that with our minds we create the world we live in, I’d suggest that the way we change our mind is to become an impartial and compassionate observer of what goes on in the mind, rather than to pile in full speed ahead in an attempt to change it.
With a creative, secular approach to meditation, we encourage stillness and self-observation. Practising meditation demands that we remain still for a period of time, and it’s more useful to sit with an open awareness than try to use the kinds of techniques and formulas that were developed for monastics long ago.
When we sit regularly, we become increasingly proficient at seeing what’s happening in the mind. With this mindful awareness, we can then direct our attention not simply at the content of our thoughts, but toward the emotions and mind states informing these thoughts. And as we work through the material that surfaces, we become more aware of the processes going on in our mind.
Sitting with a gentle, permissive, open awareness, we get to see each frame of the film (or movie, perhaps) as it runs through the mind. We’re then able to separate individual events from instinctive reaction, and instead of running away from – for example – a difficult emotion or a memory, we make space for it. At the same time, though, we don’t identify with it.
The stories of our future we write using past narratives. However, what happened in the past does not create our present pain and misery. Rather it’s the way we’ve allowed past events to define how we see and experience ourselves.
As we get to know ourselves, we cultivate a compassionate curiosity towards what’s happening within, in our inner world. This enables us to let go of those aspects of the self that we choose not to go with, for instance instinctive reactions such as wanting/not wanting.
Hang on a minute though – are you one of those people who feels like they’re in a constant state of reactivity? You’re aware, I hope, that this reactivity isn’t so much to the world, rather it’s to your interpretations of it? This is because you’re focussing on what’s outside the skin, not on what’s going on within it.
Look, suppose someone triggers a reaction in you, what’s more important: the person, or the reaction? I’d suggest that real choice starts the moment we’re able to pause, and become present.
And meditation is a great way to work with our closest, most immediate environment – the inner world.
This kind of mindful awareness can be practised throughout the day, not just when we sit in meditation. From time to time, we simply pay close attention to our experience without looking for distraction.
And if at the end of each formal meditation session, we can have a notebook and pen/cil at hand, briefly reflecting on and jotting down what we can recollect, that could also be very useful.
Ah, but hang on a minute you don’t feel like journaling, but you want to be ‘good’ at meditation? You’d like deep insights to appear, and you’re expecting spiritually uplifting things will happen? Without journalling your meditation sessions, I’d suggest that any of this is far less likely to happen in the foreseeable future.
Anyway, it’s preferable not to hope to be ‘good’ at meditation, or even want to achieve anything. Instead, my recommendation is that you look at what you’re doing as a process of unfolding that requires you to act in a slow, persistent, creative and repetitive way – a gentle process.
Once you have an established meditation practice, your greatest challenge is to take full responsibility for that practice.
And it’s not just hard slog. If we do meditate wisely and intelligently, journalling each of our meditation sessions, reflecting on what we’ve written perhaps once a month, the mind will lead us into some wonderful places.
You’ll discover that meditation braces our intuition, which in turn allows us to make informed choices about which practice(s) to pursue, which groups to join, which teachers to listen to, which websites to follow, and which books to read.
And as we cultivate meditation, bringing Gotama’s four great tasks and his eightfold path into our lives, like the sunshine and rain that help our food grow, something marvellous happens: this practice subtly but profoundly begins to transform us.
You’ll experience some ease in your life. You’ll be calmer, more emotionally present, more compassionate, and less the victim of reactive triggers; a self-regulating adult, you’ll be somewhat less prone to self-soothing addictive behaviours.
But these are just promises on a screen. There’s only one way you’ll ever know if meditation is worth the effort: learn to do it, and keep on doing it.
See it for yourself.
Resources
❖ For the easiest of meditation instructions listen to Open meditation instructions from the Sydney, Australia, secular insight meditation teacher, Winton Higgins here:
❖ Download a two-page handout for new meditators, and those who want to try a different kind of practice:
Getting started with an experience-based approach to secular meditation
❖ And if you’d like to join a small group from One Mindful Breath on the 1st and 3rd Mondays of the month for an online meditation session on Zoom, take look here for more information.