"Suggestion" #2: Mediation

I have been practicing meditation off and on since 2003, when I was pretty stuck/unhappy in my life and decided meditation sounded cool, so jumped right in by going to a week-long silent meditation retreat. We woke at 6am every morning and sat five or six times a day for an hour at a time. As anyone who has practiced for a while may realize, this was a pretty overwhelming way for a beginner to start out. I had no problem not talking to anyone for a week, but I could barely sit still during sessions and my mind was so far from quiet I couldn’t even imagine what that would be like. I was definitely in over my head and didn’t get what I wanted out of the experience.

Of course what I was looking for was answers. If only I tried hard enough and concentrated and went through such an intense experience, then I would deserve for my life to be transformed. The problem was that there was one huge, giant cat in my house that I was unwilling to look at. So the week was a long exercise in avoidance, running circles in my mind while trying to convince myself I was on the fast track to enlightenment. Just thinking about it now makes me tired.

Five years later I’m just trying to sit daily, for as long as I feel like it. I do a few minutes of Shiva Nata, and then sit in a corner in my office. (More about Shiva Nata later, but it tends to electrify the air around my head, which is so trippy, it’s like a heavy stillness.) I’m practicing the vipassana technique which as far as I remember just means “follow your breath without trying to control it.” This makes me think of a line from the song “One night in Bangkok” so that usually goes through my head for a while, then I think about what I have to do after I meditate, I think about how good I’m getting at meditation and how enlightened I’m going to be, then I remember I’m no longer concentrating on my breath and the whole loop starts over again.

It’s been a few months since I have started practicing again, so my goal suggestion is just to keep at it while not beating myself up if I skip a few days.

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