Flo

Michael’s blog http://cloud9000.com/michael/2007/01/25/living-in-the-past-part-2/ echoes something I recently heard and scribbled on the front page of last week’s newspaper “Sometimes in order to move forward, you have to stop looking back”.

I was struck by this the day I heard it, by the sincerity of it, the truth to it.  Looking back isn’t always bad, it depends on what you’re doing while you look.  I previously mentioned a meditation retreat I attended in October but didn’t talk about the process I went through that weekend.  I spent the first two days thinking about past and present every time my eyes were shut.  It felt like I had made enormous progress when I was able to shut my eyes and notice the sounds in the room.  I heard someone sneeze.  Another person blew their nose.  There was a shuffling sound as someone returned to their mat.  Someone took a drink from their water bottle.  Because my eyes were closed, sounds and smells were what I noticed.  Had my mind been as it had been at the beginning, I wouldn’t have noticed how lunch smelled, how insightful the words spoken to us were.  I wouldn’t have noticed that my body was comfortable and at ease in the meditation position.  If I hadn’t had two days of quiet sitting, my body and my brain would have never met up with each other.

Namaste’  Flo

I am a beginning meditation student.  In my mind, I will always be a beginning meditation student.  Having toyed with the idea of meditation for more than five years, actually since my first Natalie Goldberg writing workshop http://www.mabeldodgeluhan.com/workshops.html, I find incorporating meditation into my daily life sometimes challenging.

Last month, as I sat at Shambhala Mountain Center at the Shambhala Training Level I: The Art of Being Human meditation retreat, I listened to various questions posed by the 60+ participants.  One question asked was “why should we meditate”?  Deborah Bright, who provided the talks for the weekend, answered “to get our mind and body in the same place, at the same time”. 

I was and am fascinated by the simplicity of the answer.  Yet, it is one of the most difficult things for me to do, to get my brain and body to be in the same place at the same time.  During the weekend retreat, the thing I noticed was a shift. My monkey mind moving from past/future thoughts to being in the moment, in the room we meditated in.  I went from thinking about conversations at home before I left and what I’ll do when I get home to( finally) noticing the sounds in the room, the temperature in the room and occasionally, just occasionally, my breathing. That was my progress for the weekend.  It hasn’t happened again since I got home.  My mind is everywhere and my meditation time flies by and I find I’ve figured out how to cover my sofas, organize the bathroom, where to move the pictures and what to donate to ARC.  Every now and then, I remember the breathing part.

I think that’s why it’s called a meditation practice.  Each day, I “practice” getting my brain and body to join forces, in the same place, at the same time, for even just one moment.

Tonight, I’m obsessing about “the things I hang onto.”  Unfortunately, it’s not the positive things that roll around in my head and I wonder about all of us.  How much do our negative thoughts impact our happiness?

The answer to that question is obvious. It is difficult to think about what level of happiness we feel when we are faced with challenge after challenge (after challenge) and we just can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel.  I’m not sure where I’m going with this except to say that it’s so important to acknowledge the emotions you do feel, even the painful ones.  None of us are pain free.  It’s the holding, the avoiding acknowledging our feelings that creates so much pain, confusion and despair.  We’re often taught to “suck it up”, “hold it in, don’t express it”, and “only baby’s cry”.  I guess those are ways of coping with emotions, I just don’t feel they are the best or most compassionate ways to treat ourselves.

So, would you act different, be different if you were looking at how to compassionately treat yourself?  It puts an entirely different twist on how I treat me.  I think it’s easy to get caught up in treating others with compassion and somehow forget about ourselves in the picture.  The truth is, if we start inside first, it’s a whole lot easier to be kind, caring and compassionate to others.