Wholeness begins with Rest
The mind, oh the mind. What are we going to do with this mind of ours?
It is so busy, so stubborn, so incorrigible, or so it seems at least.
We long for stillness and when we find it, we run, back into the arms of our spinning thoughts embrace.
It’s been described as a monkey mind, bouncing from tree to tree, never still. Countless times have I heard someone say they can’t quiet their mind, or can’t relax it. We don’t know where our thoughts even come from, one second not there, next there, and next we are lost in them.
To rest it, there are a few things you need to understand. One is that it is easy for the mind to be all over the place. It takes no effort whatsoever. That isn’t news to you, I know, but what that means about Rest is that it takes effort. That feels like an oxymoron, making effort to rest. Yet it is true, and you probably already know that.
The place this goes most wrong in meditation is in the type of effort we apply. Too much force, strain, unnaturalness to our efforts and we get lost in thought again and forget what we were even doing. The effort is to rest is a remembrance. Which is also the literal meaning of Sati - which is the Pali word for meditation which is translated into mindfulness. Remembrance is not an act of fixing what is broken or flawed. Remembrance does not come out of force. Have you ever lost something and wracked your brain trying to remember, how successful has that been? Remembrance is not imagination of a magical, mystical experience.
To rest the mind, our effort can be called Direction. If we direct our mind, we can keep it busy but on restful things. Think about the last time someone really cut you off in traffic, in a dangerous way, and how long you railed on about it. Or what memory from 10 or 20 years ago do you still get lost in today. You absolutely ARE able to focus your mind, you’re just focusing it on hectic and harmful things. With a little direction, and some practice you will have picked up the art of meditation rather easily, and it won’t be long before you’re really seeing changes in how you interact with the world.
Another key in the direction is your body. It is a huge part of what we have forgotten when we are lost in our thoughts and worries. The other part is who we are at our core, but that we can address in another post.
Without awareness of our body and feelings, our mind gets wrapped up in a vicious cycle of our thoughts making our body feel worse and our body making our mind feel worse. Buddhism calls it attachment, Christianity might call it worshiping an idle or another master or God, and there are plenty of other ways this universal struggle has been symbolized. Directing the mind to rest, is still the simple process to change this.
Most people seek meditation to find peace from the minds constant barrage, or respite from stressful life circumstances that trigger us into our lesser than graceful selves. It is this peacefulness that we have forgotten and in order to remember it, we must be reminded what it feels like in our body. In that process, we come to recognize all the feelings of dis ease in our body. Recognizing those we begin to unwind them.
Incorrigible means not able to be corrected, improved, or reformed. While the attached mind is highly incorrigible at times, it isn’t actually unable to change. It sure may seem like it, because you really really want it to change, and the more you want it, the less you seem able to. This is the forceful effort I referred to before. Instead of that path, Direct it to rest.
Cultivation of rest for the mind does work, and does change it.
Directing the mind to rest is a wonderful skill to develop that can surely change all of these typical patterns of the mind. We begin learning directing in our Movement (Pilates and Yoga) programs. When we are ready to unwind the mind patterns, we begin to delve into understanding which is a sort of vaporizor gun. It is wonderful to have a quieter mind, and be able to direct it to rest, but for any of us with challenges in life, our past, our relationships, our jobs, our family, whatever it is, we will keep coming into contact with things that seemingly send us right back to our old patterns. Until understanding comes and they turn to dust. In our Meditation programs, using the meditative awareness process, we gain understanding over our mindbody so fully that those patterns get vaporized. One by one, little by little, layer by layer. But when they are gone, they are gone. They don’t come back.
Life in the Body has the tools to walk you through each leg of the journey, with the goal of arriving at wholeness. Discovering your wholeness - its there already, just hidden beneath all that fluff.