Meditation means different things to many different people, so I guess all I can offer here is my definition of what it means to me. We live in a world that is constantly bombarded by stimulation and these stimuli, in turn cause us to behave in the way that we do. For the most part, that means that we are, in many ways, a product of our process. That is to say that we are all prone to acting out according to what we perceive to be our prevailing circumstances, without giving much thought to how our actions might actually affect other people.
Sounds familiar? Well I guess it should, as that’s what it means to be human, to be capable of intellectually introspecting our own behaviour, in the hope that we may eventually come to improve it, if we desire it to be so. In truth, we would all like to be a little kinder, a little more patient and calm with other people, but we have to begin this process by first being nicer to our selves.
This is what meditation encourages, a means for us to give our selves a break from our own minds. The mind, you see, is drive by the constant input we receive from the world. These perceptions build up a kind of pressure in our thinking and when the mind is full of thought, it acts in a very volatile manner. Meditation is how we come to create more space in the mind by learning to separate our thoughts from our awareness…
Ok, this may sound a little strange at first, but it is both possible and incredible to experience. In essence what carries all thought is awareness but the awareness is not the thought itself. We may fee that to be aware is to think and vice versa but this is not so take, for example, the shoes on your feet, you can be aware of their presence without having to ever think about them. So too, it is with any other sensory input, we can learn to experience, without the need to entangle it in thought.
In mediation, by paying attention to the breath, we are directing our focus away from the mind, by investing it elsewhere, as in the body. In this regard, we are actually withdrawing our energy from our minds and allowing the pent up thinking to untangle itself, giving us a sense of expansiveness in our minds. This means that when we receive a stimulus now, there is more room for it to be assimilated before responding.
What discover is that the place behind the thoughts, the awareness, where all reality springs from, is infinite in essence and that when we learn to step back from the thoughts for a while, we start to become more connected to this source. We free up our busy minds to create more space to consider our responses to other people and situations. In this regard, we become more empathetic both to other and ourselves, for in truth, as we discover, reality is not some kind of substance, as we have been lead to believe, but in fact an idea, one which has one leg in the outward expression of you and me and the other in the infinite awareness that penetrates all things…
