posted by Paige on Uncategorized

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You might as well know the truth: meditation always sort of scared me. There was the stillness and the silence and then the thoughts. All those thoughts that would roil up and ask to be looked at, ask to be seen.

What I didn’t get–the fundamental misunderstanding I brought to meditation–is that the practice is not to quiet the thoughts or make them disappear. The practice is to recognize them, thank them, and let them go at their own pace.

What the monks on Mount Koya may have known that I didn’t is that the thoughts running through our minds are not who we are. We are not those thoughts, but the observers of them. The thoughts themselves pass like clouds in an otherwise clear sky, and the observer remains there, watching.

The clouds simply are. Just as we don’t judge clouds as good or bad, right or wrong, the practice of meditation asks us to treat our thoughts in much the same way. The thoughts that float or skip or tumble into our minds are a part of our humanity, part of our animal selves, and they serve many very important purposes. But they’re not who we are.

Through meditation, we can connect with the true essence of ourselves–that observer–and watch the thoughts do their thing. The more we do this, the easier it becomes to recognize the reality of the situation: that the thoughts are simply thoughts. There’s no need to give them any power, any credence.

And therefore there’s no need to resist them. It doesn’t actually matter much whether they seem to us to fall into the broad categories of positive or negative. They will pass. It’s the resistance of them that causes pain.

So this is something else those peaceful-looking monks may have thoroughly integrated that I had not yet even considered: that all our thoughts and feelings are here to be seen. That’s all they really want. Our fear is that if we stop to look at them, they’ll suck us into some black hole of pain from which we’ll never emerge.

But really they’re just messages to us, here to serve us. Our fear asks us to look inward, our anger teaches us to look at our boundaries, our sadness shows us how to release. They’re beautiful and vital messages from our innermost selves, and they’re here to help. Even the “negative” ones, the scary ones. Sometimes especially those.

When we resist thoughts and feelings, it’s like trying to escape from a Chinese finger trap by pulling hard in opposite directions. Not only does it prevent the ends we have in mind, but it leads to frustration and even mild panic. It’s only when we relax our fingers and push them inward–when we give the thoughts and feelings the attention they need and then let them pass on their way–that we become free. Completely free to relax back into the wholeness of who we really are.

Tags: emotions, mind