The practice of meditation has dramatically changed my life and I want to tell you one of the reasons why. On a recent meditation retreat, I was asked to meditate by assuming that whatever I was experiencing right now would last forever. Another participant asked the obvious question. What do I do if my experience is an unpleasant one? The answer that he was given was that if he wanted to be free, then he would need to find a way to be ok with the unpleasant feelings possibly lasting forever. I will always remember that answer. I remember it still during times when unpleasant feelings knock on my door (and how unpleasant they can be!). And while I still, more often than not, tend to resist those feelings, I sometimes manage to taste that freedom. I am talking about a freedom that comes with closing your eyes and completely surrendering to what is. A freedom that comes from imagining that you will have to be with your present experience forever, however unpleasant it is, and so avoidance is futile. A freedom that may seem a result of ''giving up'' but is truly an act of leaping into the unknown with some kind of intuitive trust that things will be ok.
The miracle of doing this is, that if I wait long enough, if I truly commit to surrendering to the entirety of my experience, without trying to escape to some future idea of this experience finally going away, a space opens up. I have come to recognize that this space is not something to take lightly or to brush away. In fact, seeking to access this space more consistently has become the center around which my life now gravitates. You see, this space is something outside of ''mind'', outside of concepts and language. It is something outside of even my mind’s concept of ''me''. What is this space? And how is it possible that it seems to exist outside of mind? How come it arises when my mind gets out of the way, when I simply connect to the experience of the moment and not to the interpretations of that experience? These questions have become the driving force of why I wake up in the morning and these realizations have changed my perceptions of the world so completely.
Moreover, for someone like me who suffers from chronic feelings of anxiety, these experiences in meditation have taught me how to get closer to true contentment. That is, to taste what it would mean to be truly ok, no matter the internal storms that wash over me at times. So next time you are not feeling so well, I invite you to try this, to close your eyes and to surrender so completely to what you are experiencing, as if this experience were to last forever and so you needed to find a way to be ok now, and in the next moment, and in the next after that. See how that feels for you, whether something shifts, whether something becomes lighter, whether an expansion arises, or whether a light shines through the cracks. Because, as I have learned in meditation, you don't have to feel ok in order to be ok. And that is where the secret to true contentment lies.
The miracle of doing this is, that if I wait long enough, if I truly commit to surrendering to the entirety of my experience, without trying to escape to some future idea of this experience finally going away, a space opens up. I have come to recognize that this space is not something to take lightly or to brush away. In fact, seeking to access this space more consistently has become the center around which my life now gravitates. You see, this space is something outside of ''mind'', outside of concepts and language. It is something outside of even my mind’s concept of ''me''. What is this space? And how is it possible that it seems to exist outside of mind? How come it arises when my mind gets out of the way, when I simply connect to the experience of the moment and not to the interpretations of that experience? These questions have become the driving force of why I wake up in the morning and these realizations have changed my perceptions of the world so completely.
Moreover, for someone like me who suffers from chronic feelings of anxiety, these experiences in meditation have taught me how to get closer to true contentment. That is, to taste what it would mean to be truly ok, no matter the internal storms that wash over me at times. So next time you are not feeling so well, I invite you to try this, to close your eyes and to surrender so completely to what you are experiencing, as if this experience were to last forever and so you needed to find a way to be ok now, and in the next moment, and in the next after that. See how that feels for you, whether something shifts, whether something becomes lighter, whether an expansion arises, or whether a light shines through the cracks. Because, as I have learned in meditation, you don't have to feel ok in order to be ok. And that is where the secret to true contentment lies.
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