Oakville Zen Meditation
Meditation: a misunderstanding
We are attracted to practice mindfulness meditation from many reasons:because of what we read from Google or were told by others or because we want more out of our life and ourselves.
We want to be more peaceful, more centered, more balanced, more patient, more in control, wiser and more compassionate. We want more of this and more of that, less of this and more of that.
In other words, we are continuously looking for a better life from life itself. This is pure mind-made delusion.
This permanent search for changing the outside is like having a six-foot fire dancing in our restless head, fueled by external causes for which we have little control if any.
Beside yourself, what do you control? Almost nothing even if your ego disagrees with.
Thinking that we do control our life is a recipe for a roller-caster yo-yo mental suffering.
Life will not change a bit because you want it to change simply because what we call “life” is a biological scientific fact and not a person with some sort of feeling towards you. Beside the initial genetic event, being alive day after day is the result of zillions of external factors for which we have no control whatsoever that we like it or not.
If you are looking for an extinguisher to stop your ongoing fire in your head, you will neither find it in Zen mindfulness meditation.
Meditation will not fix your life, its content and your problems but it may fix yourself and your wild mind, the only entity that we do control if we learn how to.
If you are looking for a quick fix, you should go to a 45 min. massage, run 20K every day, try marijuana, book a gateway 10 days in the Florida or a cruse, eat 1 pound of chocolate, tune to Netflix, get a new job or any other quick fix. All of them are transient and this is why we are always looking for another fix all the time because the previous fix is gone.
In Zen, we do not meditate on life, its content and how to change our stressors, bad /good news, wars, hatred, our neighbors, our family, work, weather, friends, what you have and don’t have, what you like and dislike, what you want and don’t want and so on.
We meditate on how to tame our emotional mind thru mindful awareness.
So, this internal fire of trying to change our outside world for the better cannot be extinguished with
a external quick fixes but by an internal one such as mindfulness meditation
Meditation is misunderstood because it has nothing to do by trying to fix the world around you, your boss, your dislike and don’t want, your emotions n or to be happy 24/7.
It is simply the practice of being mindful of the present reality of the moment that is w/any analysis, judgment and decision. Just being grounded like a mirror. Sounds easy...it is not.
By doing so, we learn not to try to change x, y, z --- almost impossible to do most of the time----but how we perceived and accept x, y, z as they are if we cannot change them. Huge difference.
This difference has big impact on the quality of our life and our perception of its content such as people, events, good and bad things and our emotional mind.
The point of meditation is to stop making things up all the time with endless expectations, regrets, frustration, hatred, illusions, envy, swimming in the past and future but rather and see and experience life and its content as they are in the present moment.
It does not mean to be defeatist nor pessimistic but rather wiser and more serene.
When there is a solution, look for it. If there is no solution, by definition, there is no problem!
Is it clear?
Changing how we perceive things -----good and bad----and to accept them as they are means to have a better control of our emotional mind and to realize that this is the most efficient way to feel better if not serene.
To build our internal extinguisher demands a lot of practice, discipline, patience, trust and a no-judgmental approach to the practice because it requires progressive rewiring of our rational and emotional circuits of our brain in favor of the former. This is part of neuroplasticity that we talk about few months ago and posted as blog # 96
