REASONS TO MEDITATE. Part 1 of 4.
If you're anything like me, you want to know exactly what you're getting for your time and energy before you commit to an activity. Why waste 10 or 15, or even 20 minutes of your hard-earned spare time each day monitoring your breath or repeating the same sentence over and over when you might be playing a video game, watching Netflix, or surfing the web? That's because of the numerous advantages that meditation has to offer!
However, before getting into these advantages, this post will examine some of the issues that meditation may assist with. "If it’s not broken don't fix it," as the saying goes. Well, the fact is that many of us find our lives "broken" in important ways. After all, you started reading this post for a reason or two. It's time to find out what some of those causes may be.
So what Motivates You to Meditate? Life does not always live up to your expectations, even if you are hesitant to accept it publicly. As a result, you experience tension, disappointment, anxiety, wrath, anger, hurt, or various other negative feelings. Meditation teaches you how to deal with tough situations and the tensions and emotions they elicit with calm, serenity, and compassion. But, before I discuss the wonderful remedies that meditation has to offer — and believe me, there are many — I want to take you on a quick tour of the issues they're meant to fix. The notion of the ideal existence.
As a clinical hypnotherapist, and meditation & mindfulness instructor, I've observed that many people suffer because they compare their lives to some romantic notion of how life should be. This picture hides in the shadows, cobbled together from childhood conditioning, media messages, and personal ambitions, and becomes the standard to which every accomplishment or failure, every scenario or turn of events, is compared and assessed. Take time to look over yours. Perhaps you've spent your entire life attempting to achieve the family dream: two children, a suburban home, a successful career. After all, it's what your parents had (or didn't have), and you determined that you owed it to yourself and to them to succeed. Only now are you working extra hours to save for a deposit, your marriage is breaking apart, and you feel terrible for not spending enough time with the kids.
Or perhaps you feel that achieving the perfect body would bring you ultimate satisfaction. Diets don't work, you can't make yourself stick to workout routines, and every time you look in the mirror, you want to throw up. Perhaps your vision of earthly paradise is the ideal partnership. Unfortunately, as the year's pass, you still haven't found Mr. or Ms Right, and you search online dating profiles while secretly believing that you must have some terrible social ailment. Whatever your vision of the perfect life is — perfect holidays, perfect sex, perfect health, even ultimate release from all strain and worry — you pay a tremendous price for having such lofty goals. When life, inevitably, fails to live up to those expectations, you end up hurting and blaming yourself.
If only you had earned more money, spent more time at home, be a better lover, returned to school, and shed those excess kilos.. The list goes on and on. You simply do not measure up, no matter how you slice it. Or maybe you're one lucky few who obtain everything they desire. The trouble is that you ultimately become bored and want more — or you spend every free time trying to defend or manage what you have. The great meditation traditions have a more compassionate message to share. They preach that the perfect existence on Earth is fiction. These traditions remind us that far more powerful forces than you and me are at work in the cosmos. You may imagine, aim, strive, and attempt to manage all you desire – and eventually attain some measure of achievement. But, in the long run, you and I have minimal influence over our life circumstances. When everything continues to fall apart, you may find it challenging to embrace the basic spiritual truth that you and I have little influence over the events in our life since it contradicts everything you've ever been taught. After all, isn't the objective of life to "just do it," as the old Nike commercials urged? Yes, you must pursue your aspirations and live your truth; this is a critical component of the equation. But how do you react when life slaps you in the face, as it occasionally does? Or, when it fully devastates you and robs you of everything you've worked for, including your confidence and hard-won self-esteem, where do you turn for help and support? How do you deal with the anguish and bewilderment? What inner resources do you rely on to lead you through this difficult and uncharted territory?
Consider the following example. One day, a mother came to see the Buddha holding her deceased child. She had travelled from place to place, bereaved, seeking strangers for medicine to bring him back to life. As a final option, she sought the Buddha for assistance. "Yes," he responded, "but first, bring me some mustard seed from a house where no one has ever died." The woman went door to door, enquiring, but no one could assist her. Every house she entered had seen its fair share of tragedies. By the time she reached the hamlet's end, she had realised that disease and death are unavoidable. After burying her son, she sought spiritual guidance from the Buddha. "There is just one law in the cosmos that never changes," he continued, "that all things change and are transient." Hearing this, the woman became a student and, it is believed, finally gained enlightenment. Of course, life provides far more than disease and death; it also provides us exceptional moments of love, beauty, surprise, and joy. But, like the woman in the story, we in the West, prefer to dismiss the dark side of life. We lock our mentally ill and developmentally challenged in hospitals and asylums, disregard our homeless, limit our underprivileged minority to slums and ghettos, and cover our advertisements and publications with smiling images of youth and prosperity.
The truth is that life is a complex and puzzling combination of brightness and darkness, success and failure, youth and age, joy and anguish — and, yes, life and death. Circumstances change, appearing to fall apart one minute and coming back together the next. Everything is always losing its balance against a background of perfect balance. The key to your mental health is not your circumstances but how you respond to them. Suffering, according to Buddhists, is desiring what you don't have and not wanting what you do have. In contrast, pleasure is the inverse: loving what you have and not hungering for what you don't have. This idea does not imply that you must abandon your principles, hopes, and aspirations; rather, they must be balanced with the ability to accept things as they are. Meditation teaches you to reserve judgement and to be open to each experience without attempting to modify or get rid of it, which allows you to grow acceptance. When things are tough, you may utilise this quality to calm your ruffled feathers and keep your mind at ease.
Come back tomorrow for part 2.
Be well.
We all need a helping hand from time to time. Please share this post with as many people as possible. You never know who might need it.
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