Welcome to Meditation Monday. It's a joy to be back with you. Thanks for hopping on. So many of us come to meditation to help us with stress, and rightly so. Meditation is a great vehicle for dialing down our nervous systems, coming back into homeostasis, into more of a balanced state. But I've noticed over 15 years of teaching meditation that it's not uncommon for people to get stressed about meditation. There's good reason for that. In meditation, we're still, we're quiet, and for many of us, we just don't do that in the course of our day. We're busy all the time, engaged in activities. We also don't have distractions. If we're feeling uncomfortable, we can't reach for the phone while we're meditating, or whatever our favorite distractions might be. So it's perfectly natural.
But there's even a bigger reason, I think, why people get stressed around it, which is that we commonly think — I did it myself for years — that there's something that I'm supposed to kind of measure up to. There's some way my meditation is supposed to be. And one of the common misconceptions right there is about thinking: thinking that we're supposed to have no thoughts when we meditate. Basically, it's rubbish. We are developing a different relationship with thoughts, it's true, but our brains naturally secrete thought, as some people put it. So we're not aspiring to have total, you know, radio silence within when we meditate. Not at all. So in this sit, we're going to deal with and address some of this meditation stress, i.e., stress around meditation itself, particularly when it comes to thinking.
So let's come into our comfortable seated position. Get yourself set up, seated in a way that feels good for you. We want to be comfortable. We want to be able to relax. So right now, we can close the eyes or lower them, if you prefer keeping them open but lowered. Just give yourself a moment to come back to you. This is really about you. It's about you as you are right now. And you know, sometimes we also get inklings that it's about coming back to some sort of deeper sense of myself, something that in a way has been here all my life and that I may have journeyed far from. But now we can start coming back, and it begins with being here just as we are right now.
So let's again check how much tension we're holding in our jaw, and release the jaw. Imagine there's a little sling right under your chin that your jaw can rest in, and let it rest. Let your arms hang like the sleeves of an old coat, totally relaxed. See if you can find a certain sense of warmth and softness in the chest, in the belly, in the hips, and letting legs and feet also be relaxed, at rest. We're really just coming home to ourselves, to this our life, just like this.
Now, as we're resting and being a bit more present, very commonly thoughts will come up, and before we know it, we're off on a train of thought. And then we realize, oh, whoa, I've been far away in another time and place, thinking. Great, we've recognized that that's happened. We congratulate ourselves. We've come back. And what we're going to do is just check where we were in our thinking, just enough to be able to file the thinking we were just in in one of three files: memories, plans, imaginings. So just check what kind of thinking it was, file in either memories, planning, or imagining, thank the thoughts for showing up, and come back. So as we go, I'll offer a few little prompts.
Sitting here in a restful state, present, not needing to do anything, just noticing when thoughts have come up, when we've been carried off by thinking.
So any time thoughts have arisen, note them, welcome them, and file them in one of those three folders: memories, planning, imagining. And when there's no thoughts, just rest in being present right here, sensing your calm, relaxed body. You might notice some sounds around you.
Resting in the here and now, just this as it is.
And recognizing that thoughts will arise and filing them according to that little scheme: memories, plans, imaginings, when we notice they have arisen.
So we're not trying to have no thoughts. We're just seeing if we can notice thoughts when they arise. We acknowledge them and we file them away in one of those three folders and come back to not really doing very much, basically a kind of wakeful rest and attentive not doing, just being with our experience as it is right now. Soft body, some amount of sounds around us, and sometimes thoughts.
Okay, let's gently bring a little movement back into the body, whatever might feel good for you. Some people like to sway, some people like to move fingers and toes, just coming back, raising the eyes. Great. Now, one thing that I just want to say as we conclude here is that the most important thing — I'm quite sure of this, actually — with meditation is not sort of how well we think we do it, or how good a time we might have doing it. And we will sometimes have blissful, peaceful experiences and so on. But actually, the most important thing is just that we spend a little portion of our day being quiet and still and not reaching for common distractions. Just that stillness impacts our unconscious. Just the fact of being quiet — as quiet as we are in our minds doesn't matter so much — that we are actually just not talking for that period of time, quiet and still, it impacts, it feeds into our own consciousness, and it gradually changes us over time in beautiful ways that we can really come to appreciate more and more as we go. Thank you very much for joining me. See you next time.
