What is Meditation? When I first heard of meditation I already had lost, I thought it was what somebody did when they floated in ecstasy, problemless. It sounded awesome, but then I closed my eyes and failed.
Instead, I was in corporate America, going through inner turmoil, depression, a problem with my boss, confusion about my purpose and I was genuinely lost and closing my eyes wasn’t making me perfect.
The truth is, I found, after researching the method, is that meditation is just a practice of a “single-pointed focus.” You start where you are. In fact, it’s just a practice of asking the mind to focus on one thing. Prolonged meditation, prolonged stilling of the mind often leads to a feeling of calm, and ultimately can lead to a feeling of deep peace. So when I closed my eyes, I thought I was doing it all wrong. I was thinking more like someone who thinks I can’t use a computer, but they won’t sit down at the keyboard. I wanted to be a champion but I wouldn’t begin the training. Meditation is not the final outcome, it is a means, a means to ceasing the endless fluctuations of our minds (Yoga Sutras) and feeling the peace that comes from not worrying, not fearing, not feeling, not doing, not needing, not needing to be anything, just being. Just being free.
The goal of meditation, one of 8 steps to inner peace, which is the yoga, is not perfection. The goal is freedom from wanting perfection. In other words, if I want something to happen, now I’ve launched a cascade of lists, justifications and plans, all of these are mental fluctuations that are scattering my energy, my focus is everywhere and I begin to feel overwhelmed. Tonight in class, I suggested that it doesn’t even matter if what I think is good or bad, it matters if I’m grasping for either. If I am and I allow, it’s ok, I am needless, I don’t need to make a list of how to get that, it already is. I don’t need to figure out who to screw to stop this from happening, I accept the present and allow. I am free of needing to do anything. See, and that’s some Jesus love right there. That’s some unconditional love.
We tell my son to be a “good boy.” Quitting that is deep. Telling him to be good is like telling him to never fail and that’s not going to happen. He needs the polarities to learn. He’s five, he doesn’t grasp that we need him to fit into a societal construct, or we hope that he won’t suffer, that I don’t want him to go to jail. That I have spent hours fearing the worst for him and hoping for the best. How can I ask him to love himself unconditionally, when I consistently tell him, he’s bad if he makes a mistake? How is he to love all parts of himself when I consistently reject them?
Like all of us now and then, my son doesn’t realize that suffering is the teacher, he’s just caught up in the natural cycle of acting and reacting. He’s going to be a good boy, he’s going to be a bad boy, he’s going to be a smart boy a stupid teenager, a darling and he will impress me equally with his beautiful and wicked deeds. He’s going to be it all and I want him to be. I learned more from screwing up than I ever did by being good. When I was good, I thought I was everything, untouchable, fine, and frankly, that’s when I’d stop learning and start screwing up, back to learning. The trick not what happens, but to not mind what happens, let the natural consequences flow, try not to jump in front of every potential fear, but to sit with it, look at it, face it and allow it to pass. It’s passing anyway. We’re all just in such desperation to cling to it as if it is eternal.
Meditation is the practice that asks us to calm down the reactive mind. When we consistently stop the reactor, and become the observer of our mind, we wake up from the sleep of unconscious patterns. We start to watch ourselves react. We realize, I am not depressed, I am. I am going through depression, I am. I feel stressed, I am not stress, I am observing myself going through stress. How do I know this? Because the stress passes, because everything passes, everything is temporary, and I am part of this ever-changing reality, and as a part of that, I am eternal. I am.
If you ask what the short course is to yoga, it’s Let go. Let go of the judgment, let go of the worry, the fear, the questions, the why, the bliss, let it all go and observe it. This is not to say that your reality is not real. It is. Pain is real, illness is real, and obstacles are real. They are real to you. If you are focused on obstacles the pain from that is real. Karma is real, your choices and their consequences are real. Why? We can’t grasp it all. But we know that there is another plane of awareness, a place where we can see ourselves and others as spirits working, travelling, and navigating this plane as best as we all can. We can forgive ourselves our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us, and we can allow, be free, be. This is what yoga is, it’s not some faraway place, it’s a calling all of the pieces of us home, to unconditional love for ourselves and others, we are all one. We are free, it’s just an unveiling, an unclouding and unfurling , and unfearing, and unworrying an undistancing ourselves from that place within us all that asks to feel ok. To be free. To be.
-Anne Adametz is an Acupuncturist, Yoga Specialist, and Peaceful Warrior Activist, who is probably meditating at the moment.