Day 21 - Coming Back

For me, life is a practice of 'coming back' or returning. I come back to my meditation practice when I've fallen out of the habit, to my breathing and hence the moment when my mind has wandered, and to the things that exist to be grateful for when I'm caught up in negativity.

That's the practice of a life well-lived: I notice that I'm no longer practicing, present or grateful, and I just keep coming back to meditation, the moment and joy.

Day Eight - Consciously Creating

Dustin Hoffman pretends to be a woman in the movie Tootsie. As a woman he shows greater love, compassion and support than he does as a man. Near the end of the movie he says that 'he just needs to learn to do it without the dress'.

My partner has been diagnosed with cancer.* I find that on the whole, I am in a much more loving, compassionate and supportive space as a result of this news. Now I'd just like to learn to remain there without the disease.

Not that I need the cancer to go away to be happy. But that I can create and come from such a loving and open space more frequently and consciously, and without any other catalyst than my choice to be there.

(*I feel very thankful that it is a form of cancer that is highly treatable, and I expect her to be well again soon.)

What's bothering you?

I fully believe that when something is bothering me it's because I'm being called to look at, explore or heal around it. It wouldn't be bugging me if I wasn't ready to grow in that area. The question is, "Am I willing to explore whatever it is?"

If I am willing, I go for it! If I'm not, I at least usually feel curious about my resistance to looking at it.

If I've tried to explore the issue before and just gone round and round over the same ground, that's when I work with my coach. She helps me to create shift in areas where I've been stuck.

I encourage you to work with a coach too. If you don't want to work with me, no problem. There are lots of caring and qualified people out there.

When you open and heal yourself, you help everybody, not just yourself. So if you can't bring yourself to do it for yourself, do it for the good of us all.

Day Six - No Mistakes

There are no mistakes. I was called to start meditating more consistently the day before receiving potentially stress-filled news about my partner's health. (Which by the way is still unfolding. I so appreciate your positive and loving thoughts.)

Does that mean that because of the meditation I don't feel stressed about her health? Not at all. I still float in and out of sadness, fear and worry. I do believe, however, that my meditation practice helps me deal with my stressful thoughts with greater equanimity.

I feel grateful to have listened to my inner wisdom when it suggested this 'experiment' of meditating every day for six weeks!

Day Three, Anicha

My understanding of anicha is that it's the principle of impermanence. Everything arises and passes away. My breath arises with each inhale and passes away with each exhale. The sensation of an itch on my body arises and eventually passes away. Feelings and thoughts follow this same pattern of arising and passing away.

I interrupt this natural cycle or flow whenever I try to hold onto whatever it is (a pleasant sensation for example) or whenever I try to push it away (an uncomfortable sensation for example). Without my doing anything the sensation will quite naturally and of its own accord arise and pass away, ebb and flow.

It's clinging and aversion that disrupt my experience of the natural cycle of anicha. Inevitably I try to do something to either prolong the pleasant sensation or avoid the unpleasant one. I become reactive. And more importantly I react unconsciously. In a split second I experience an itch, determine it to be uncomfortable and reach to scratch it. That's not 'bad' per se. The issue is that by unconsciously reacting to the itch rather than simply observing it within my body, I fail to notice the truth: I didn't have to jump in and do something. The itch would have passed away of its own accord without my scratching it.

What I find particularly interesting is how this plays out in other areas of my life. I experience rejection as a heaviness around my heart, and then without consciously recognizing what happened and that this unpleasant bodily sensation would pass away on its own, I do something to try to control it or to make it end: I change the subject, I tell myself and/or the other person that it wasn't important to me anyway or I lash out.

Sitting during meditation and consciously observing my bodily sensations rather than reacting to them allows me to experience firsthand how things actually work - arise, pass away, arise, pass away, arise. It's an endless cycle. And it's empowering to know that all things will eventually change whether I do something or not.

Day One, Smoking and Meditation

I smoked many years ago and I quickly learned that it was much easier to continue smoking than it was to quit.

Not surprisingly, I am experiencing something similar now with meditation: It's much easier to continue to fritter away my time than it is to sit.


Would you like to join me in your own meditation experiment? If so, set your personal goal regarding introspection or meditation and share about your experience of it here on my blog.

My Experiment

Today I began my experiment inspired by Julie and Julia, to meditate two hours a day every day for 6 weeks and to post about the experience. It seems like a huge commitment and I feel eager to see if it's one I'm willing to keep. Ah, but what to call this challenge? Jill and Vipassana just doesn't have the same ring to it...