TBT: meditate me home

A couple of weeks ago I told you I did a month-long yoga and meditation challenge. Then I proceeded to talk about yoga and didn't say anything about meditation.

So this week's topic was going to be meditation, but my brain doesn't seem to be functioning well enough today to write out what I want to say. hmmm. Maybe I should go meditate.

Anyway. I'm shamelessly modifying "Throwback Thursday" to "Throwback Tuesday" and starting the discussion with a (slightly edited) post from my old blog. I was originally drawn into meditation by reading Pema Chodron, a Buddhist teacher. I'm not really interested in the Buddhist aspect anymore, but this might still be a good place to start. Originally posted February 1, 2008.

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When I first came in contact with Buddhism, it wasn't very appealing to me. The books I read and the Buddhists I knew back then made it sound like it was all about discipline-- having your thoughts under perfect control, being cool and emotionally detached. Then a few years ago I ran across the writings of Pema Chodron and met some different Buddhists, and my impression began to change.

The heart of Buddhist practice is meditation. But my early understanding of what that meant was wrong. I thought the idea was to completely shut down all thought in your brain and try to merge with the Great Nothing. I had no idea exactly what that meant, it was just my impression of Buddhist meditation.

When I sit down to meditate now, my goal isn't to stop thinking, or even to control my thoughts. What I want is to create a little space between me and my thoughts, to watch them, see them go by-- the classic example is like watching clouds float across the sky. (I especially like that example when it is the night sky, with clouds floating by in front of a vast starry expanse.)

The point isn't to be in control of your thoughts, but to let go of the idea that they have intrinsic importance. They're just thoughts, electrical impulses that have no meaning outside what I give them.

I confess that I am terrible at this. Like many (most?) people, I have Busy Brain Syndrome. In the space of a minute, I might think about what we're having for dinner, who's picking up my son from school, what responsibilities are "real" vs. ones that I've just picked up out of guilt, where my daughter is going to college next year, whether or not I'm over-involved in her decision, is that load of laundry done, and if evil starts small, how am I participating?

And honestly, I have rarely managed to stop this flow of constant mental chatter for more than a minute or two, although I've spent far longer than that sitting and working on it. What I'm slowly learning to do is to just observe all that constant stream of thought. Just sit and watch it.

I sometimes imagine that I have a helmet on that completely covers my head. The helmet is covered with lights and dials and wires that are constantly blinking and humming and clicking, representing all my mental activity. Then I slip out of the helmet and leave it sitting there, flashing and humming and clicking away, all by itself. It is such an enormous relief.

According to the Buddhist teachers I've read in the last few years, the mind is innately spacious. If we step away from the claustrophobic stream of thoughts that makes us feel stressed and anxious, we can experience that spacious, open feeling. I've only rarely experienced this; I'm not the most disciplined of practitioners. But I've experienced it enough to continue to work at it.