The Importance of Meditation

[rva_jeremy]

I struggled way too much for way too long. For me, it was the idea that if I wasn't having some pivotal metaphysical experience, my meditation was not successful. So I would get bored, too, and I'd set my goals so ridiculously that I could never achieve them. I sabotaged myself, and I think a lot of people do this.

Pema Chödrön talks about the way meditation helps you practice refraining, by which she means our impulse to fill what we perceive as empty space. She also describes "entertainment mentality" that seeks stimulus rather than observance, and those concepts have helped me look at meditation as filling several roles at once, so it doesn't have to be an amazing experience every time for it to be worthwhile and rewarding. Fundamentally, meditation is about de-conditioning ourselves from this mentality that seeks to be always be stimulated from without by entertainment, to not need be compelled by our reflexive reactions.

Meditation is the practice of discipline, of gently bringing yourself back every time you go down a mental rabbit hole and lose your focus. It's the practice in getting to know yourself, which is all you're left with once you've stopped distracting yourself with thought. It's the practice of concentration, so that our attention is under our control rather than we under its control. It's the practice of letting go, of touching and releasing thoughts, of observing what happens when a thought enthralls us and feeling what happens after that. It's a prayer to our greater selves, a celebration of how infinite we are.

More than anything else, I think I had to get to a point where I saw meditation as an adventure. But this required me to get to a point where I was interested in myself, in how I felt and thought. I had to be willing to look at and feel things I used to avoid. I started to see meditation as a whole new way to experience this incarnation, something that was worth having patience with because it couldn't fail to yield up the kinds of experiences I had learned to value. It's not something I crave necessarily, but doing it often enough, it anchors you to a very refined mindset.

Once you think you're worth exploring, and you take what meditation has to show you about yourself seriously, I don't think you can really ever consider it boring anymore.