There’s something I’ve noticed when I wake up in the morning. I can tell, instantly, whether or not my day is going to be satisfying and productive or kind of blah. It comes down to whether, on opening my eyes, my mind immediately kicks into gear. If I wake up thinking, basically, I know I’m in for a doozy. When I wake up not thinking, but instead with a feeling of gratitude and excitement, I know the day will be a carnival.
Fortunately, most of the time I don’t wake up thinking, or I catch myself before it takes hold and off I go to someplace ridiculous. I mean, who needs to be thinking about politics and stuff like that first thing in the morning, right!?!?
But I notice there’s a pattern. When I’m hyper-disciplined with my meitation practice and am doing it every day, my mind upon waking is quieter. When I’ve lapsed and skipped a few sessions or not been consistent, things are noisier.
Meditation, then, has become my number one priority. Good days happen wih quiet, calm minds, it would seem.
Now, I know you hate it. The reason is because you mistakenly believe the purpose of it is to sit with no thoughts, or an empty head, so when you can’t do that – which nobody can btw – you assume the whole exercise is pointless and you are a failure.
But that’s not the purpose of the exercise. The purpose of the exercise is to practice being the witness to your thoughts. So it doesn’t matter how incessant they are or how noisy, because your only job is to watch them, not stop them. That’s waaaay easier than sitting without thought. TBH I’m not sure even Tibetan monks manage that. What am I saying, they probably do, they’re like, supernatural or something.
As it happens, over time you’ll notice fewer thoughts barging on through your mind during your practice, but that’s the natural effect of the practice not something you need to consciously aim for. All you do is sit with your eyes closed, concentrating on your breath, watching, witnessing, observing your thinking. That’s it.
You’ll continuously find yourself lost in thought, it doesn’t matter. You just take your awareness back to being the watcher. You start with one minute, then five, then ten. And you know how your life is now? Well imagine it’s basically the same, only better. The calmest, quietest minds in the world belong to those with the best lives – and what’s the point of playing for seconds, right?
Plus sometimes you have these totally weird, crazy perceptual experiences, and as there aren’t millions of ways to add a bit of excitement to a rainy Tuesday morning in midwinter, refusing to practice meditation makes no sense.
At first you’ll loathe it, but as soon as you have that first nutty experience where you kind of go into “the gap” and your mind stops and everything gets spookily calm, you’ll be hooked. You’ve only got to force yourself through gritted teeth until that first milestone then and you’re home free. It only takes a few days to get there. I had my first weird experience on about day six of my practice, doing 10 minutes a day. It’s a quick win.
So, when you start out and you feel this overriding urge to just stop and get up and on with something else because you’ve got bags of other stuff to do etc etc, understand this – this is the thought you have to witness. It might feel like a physical pull to stop and move on with your day but this is the thought I’m talking about.
Rolling yor eyes at this thought is the practice and the goal. It’s called meditation but its really a mind training exercise with the ultimate prize being you having the ability to laugh at any thought of yours that doesn’t make you happy. If you can do that, you are a genius with full mastery of self. Few people can do it – but you’ll be one of the elite who can, and that will not only make you able to disregard your thoughts / urges to eat when you’re snacky and munchy, it will in fact make you one of the most powerful people on the planet. I’m not even joking.
I’m not fucking around here. Gaining mastery of self, by being able to disregard your own bullshit thinking is the key to life. It’s the secret to it. So even though you hate meditating, do it anyway and then all that power? It will be yours.