الصمحقحيه فلسطينلله

Worry free natural breathing: thoughts on meditation

I had been meaning to write this for a while but today push came to shove. Within each of us there is a fountain of calmness and peace waiting to be tapped into any moment you can breathe with awareness, which is to essentially say any time you are alive – one does not need to even be physically awake to be in meditation. It does not matter if around you there is trouble or stress.
Why meditate?

– To see through the impositions of others onto your life

If you are alive, you WILL feel pressure from all around you to conform to the desires of others. Yet when you do conform, there is no change. An ever new set of desires is the new “it” to be conformed to. The people who desired you to conform will not find peace with you, nor you with them, nor you with yourself because these desires originate from a false idea in the mind and that which rests on falsehood is doomed to crumble and it cannot bring any lasting peace.
Thus we see a phenomenon known as the ‘ratrace’ or keeping up with the Jones’ where humanity seeks to satiate its rabid thirst with the finest luxurious tastiest salt water that money can buy.
You might have passed through the education system feeling the tug of people from all sides. Social circle politics, money, family, teachers, priests, friends, whatever. All of it asks you to change your Self for an ideal and almost always these ideals will throw you into suffering.

You want shoes, watches, a holiday, a partner, a gleaming car. You want to stand up for this or that rights movement, or political party, or some other cause. Or you might turn to a life of crime and express your dissatisfaction with the way you have been raised.
In all of these cases you are seeking completion in something external. Yet what is external is all something that shall pass, leaving you with nothing to show for it a few moments or years later but a few scars and smiles.
Did you acquire any lasting happiness from this? Most people die with a long list of regrets. Yet through meditating one learns to grow for themselves a tree that extends into Nirvana – total serenity and bliss, total fulfilment and understanding of reality.
Those who make time for happiness have little time left to regret or worry.

– To understand why you do the things you do and to stop making mistakes

Also known as “IT HURTS MAKE IT STOP PLEASE I WILL DO ANYTHING STOP THE PAIN”. Whenever you feel like this you have abstained from meditation. We meditate all the time and we dive in and out of it many times a day. But these meditations do not necessarily serve to always make us grow because they are carried out as part of an existing process and not of their own accord.

As they start from an existing process, the meditation only brings the fruits of that process. The best example is when you get back home from a long day and for a sweet moment you quench your thirst and sit down, relax and savour every delicious second of rest you get. This is meditation. Yet in this case the next day you will still head to work and continue the cycle of creating suffering.
When you sit down in meditation for its own end, you start to unravel a thick weaved web of responses and habits you have programmed into yourself over the years. It takes a single moment for something to go wrong and cause you life-long trauma. This creates a huge tangled up web. Then to undo it you must sit for a good period of time and gently, with emphasis on the gently, unknot this tangle.

You have two choices. Either you pass through life carrying this web of trauma, of guilt and guilty, accused and accuser, tangling each web with other new webs and diving deeper and deeper into chaotic confusion…

Or sitting down and gently unknotting every new web as it comes, so the devil loses the pretty ornate basket he uses to keeps your soul in. Of course we will all tend to do a bit of both in our lives.

Unlike detangling a pair of knotted earphones however, meditation is the polar opposite of frustrating and tedious. Meditation is the art of actively resting, of healing the body, of letting the body’s intrinsic life-energy surge through and repair and rejuvenate and renew everything.
When you start practicing meditation for its own sake you will progressively cease to do things that create future suffering for you. You will become aware that all the situations that cause you suffering are entirely of your own creation even if they might seem accidental (stubbing your toe, hit by a car) or seemingly far beyond your grasp and power of individual causation (thermonuclear war, asteroid impact, etc).

Do not be surprised to suddenly find there is a lot less drama in your life, a lot less misery. I was surprised to find that I no longer trip or fall down in general or stub my toe or scald myself on hot water or scratch myself accidentally or generally, have any clumsy mishaps. It transpired that every time these things had happened they had been far removed from accidental!
You may have been told that meditation is doing nothing, sitting down and doing nothing. Some people I know still have this idea that it is literally doing nothing, wasting space and energy as it were

Rather, it must be emphasised that meditation is the busiest activity you will ever do if you plan on doing it correctly.
You are indeed, sitting down, doing… nothing. But you are not lazily doing nothing, you are doing nothing as hard as nothing can possibly be done, you are doing nothing with the fury of a thousand suns. So when you see a person sit in stillness then on the outside you might see them to be doing nothing but truly internally they are busier than ever. No other activity in life can remotely compare to how busy the mind is when it is correctly meditating.