There are many different styles and practices of meditation and there are certain connotations and cliches, some of which I think arise from misunderstanding.
With my own 21 day courses it would be beneficial to state what they DO NOT involve
This practice is NOT:
Intention setting
Wish fulfilment
Praying to deities
Mantra
Musical accompaniment
Visualisation
Manifesting
Astral projection.
Many people do partake in some or all of the above and that is fine. I sometimes am active in prayer but meditation is a little different. Meditation in this sense is sitting as well as possible in a conducive posture, using something as a point of focus, in this case the breath, which eventually delivers detachment from the ‘thought stream’. It’s also helpful to come into the world of sensation, by feeling the contact of the feet on the floor, the bottom on the chair, and maybe scanning the whole of the body bit by bit. This has relaxation qualities which aid the focusing on the breath.
What is the ‘Thought Stream’?
The ‘thought stream’ is otherwise known as mental chatter or the voice in the head. Detaching or moving away from the thought stream brings us into contact with a deeper dimension of our reality.
Yes, that sounds a bit ‘out there’ doesn’t it? As mentioned before now, sometimes words are insufficient.
Coming into contact with that deeper dimension just means seeing what it feels like to exist without the distracting, sometimes destructive mental chatter stealing the show and dictating how we feel. In case you didn’t know, it’s very possible to exist quite comfortably without thinking.
Anyone who has done even a little practice knows that there is a state of being more wholesome, more peaceful, more relaxing, than the state where an unbridled thought stream runs the show.
Who or what is in control?
There is an equivalence with how disturbed, anxious or even depressed one can feel and the extent to which the thought stream is in control and in the lead. Equally, detaching from its overbearing nature almost always results in a calmer, more enjoyable state.
Using something as simple as the breath to focus on achieves this.
Why is this even more important in our modern culture?
Many aspects of modern civilisation are the very things that promote and provoke a tighter bond with the thought stream.
Some characteristics of the unbridled thought stream are the speed at which thoughts appear, only to be replaced by the next, as well as the random nature of them. In that state there is a lack of focus, an inability to be present with real time phenomena, an inability to emotionally regulate, an inability to know our needs and preferences as well as others, and an inability to communicate healthily, as well as many other things.
Life is fast. Life is about planning the next thing, the goals, the things we want in the future, short, medium or long term. Life is about competing, accumulating enough evidence and information help with that. Thinking helps get all this done.
Life is also about feeling stimulated, not bored or unfulfilled or even worse, it’s about doing everything possible to avoid those negative feelings. From coffee, alcohol, drugs, social media and internet highs, the convenience provided by tech, to sugary treats, fast cars, more money, more luxuries, more pleasures. In total, life at times can be completely hedonistic and is the collective response to mass avoidance of feeling unfulfilled or unloved.
Everything in moderation?
I don’t judge any of that behaviour and indulge much of it myself. But it’s important to know, is it tipping the balance? Is it giving me something too great to have to undo. How much work and time and effort does it take to come back to feeling the state of presence? If I hadn’t spelled it out sufficiently, the state of presence arises when we let go of the thought stream. The state of presence I relate directly to something that is more real.
I acknowledge that our modern world is constructed in such a way that the odds are stacked against us. It is indeed extremely difficult to find or maintain presence and find out what the life experience truly is, with so much distraction around us. So much of the world we live in generates more and more thoughts in the mind. Not to mention the traumas we carry, from experience or inter-generational, which give greater need to change our mood or state.
An ally, a friend, a tool
This is why a practice is more important than ever.
How can we mitigate the influence of the world around us?
We have a responsibility to ourselves to incorporate something that at least provides some balance.
More on thoughts
It isn’t just that our minds are passive and the outside world spoils them. What also contributes to individual or collective disturbance is the means of decoding reality that we favour.
Over what actually appears to be thousands of years there has been a growing trend of converting our experience into abstract mental concepts. As a species we have undertaken this huge project of using abstract thought, the mechanism of judgment and the implementation of a value system for all the things in our world.
Behind all this is a very real need to know the environment so that we may reduce threat or minimise things we find unpleasant, so that we may either increase chances of survival of the physical body and the continuation of our genes, but also merely to avoid things we do not find preferential.
Some of the latter can be quite trivial. for example we may judge something inanimate like a door as annoying or crap because it’s too difficult to open. We may judge a person because an accent of theirs rubs us up the wrong way. We may judge ourselves for being incapable of boiling an egg or being overweight.
Having also abstracted our individual self, we have developed a point of reference for what is good and what is bad, according to the whims of that abstracted individual.
There is another way..
It’s so so ingrained in our experience we hardly appreciate its transient qualities ie the intensity of this mode of interpreting reality is not fixed – it has changed over large periods of time and place. It has not always been the dominant mode.
Its opposite mode is, guess what?
A more experiential, holistic, ‘feeling’ of reality. You can see many more previous blogs about this very thing.
The purposes of rehashing this is to show that meditation itself is something that provides a solution to the over reliance of this mode of living life. Meditation dissolves what I relate to as a very 2-dimensional state of disturbance and unravels and unlocks a more wholesome, sturdy, balanced state of being.
If I had only a second to explain it I’d say that it simply reduces suffering.
For thousands of years it has existed as an antidote to the suffering that comes from a disturbed mind over-reliant on thoughts. Nowadays, I would say it’s even more valuable with just how our society has progressed.
I wish everyone who read the very best, should they choose to undertake a journey of learning or maintaining a meditation practice and I hope to see people on a future course.
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