meditation
Ideas for practice and teaching
meditation
Ideas for practice and teaching
But, meditation is not about feeling a certain way. It’s about feeling the way you feel.
Just as there is no one instrument that is the sole, true embodiment of music, there is no hierarchy of traditions or practices. Who is to say that the violin is better or worse than the piano?
Once we see that the goal of awakening is to be conscious of both our separate identity as a person and our essential identity as awareness, it becomes much easier to wake up to oneness.
One of the virtues of meditation is that it allows you to tolerate or even enjoy such between moments, to befriend the material your mind throws to the surface when it is not otherwise occupied by chasing something or trying to improve its condition.
Over and over again we will have to do this. We will forget. Farther down the path, tomorrow, or perhaps later today, we will forget about stillness. And when we do, we will have lost the thread. Without this central practice, none of it will make any sense.
A lot of meditation is just showing up for what we have, and there is joy in that. It’s diferent from the kind of happi- ness that comes from getting what you wanted. It’s a joy that doesn’t have a good reason. It’s a joy that allows you to be sad or upset, because you’re alive in the midst of it.
We so routinely look outside of ourselves for answers that when we turn to look within, it can feel foreign. It can feel challenging, confusing, scary, and painful.