Meditation For The Manic

Josh Reeves shares tips and advice on how to meditate for the partially or mostly insane. Meditation may seem out of reach for those who are busy, struggle to find time to themselves, or can’t settle their mind. This series can help!

Transcript

Meditation for the Manic,

Part 1 – Four Myths About Meditation This five-part series is all about meditation for the manic.

Now you may ask,

Am I manic?

Mania is defined as being affected by mania,

In other words,

Becoming deranged by the busy,

Being inflicted with the weight of a never-ending to-do list,

Becoming deranged with the constant pace of life so fast that you've lost all ability to stop and smell the roses.

If your to-do list is longer than your list of values,

If you think faster than you listen,

And if you are always at work even in your sleep,

You might be a manic.

For those of us with busy lives,

Screaming children or in-laws,

A non-stop mind,

And an active heart caught up in politics,

Mania may be closer than we think.

At times in my life,

I've driven myself so crazy that the only comfort I could find was identifying someone who appeared crazier than I was.

Phew,

At least I'm not as bad as he is.

I'd like to think there was a better technique to turn to,

And there is.

Meditation The practice of meditation—meditative time,

Meditative moments—this helps.

Shinryu Suzuki,

A great teacher of meditation,

Once said,

How can you get your life in order if you yourself are not in order?

Meditation is a meaningful way to get yourself in order.

And for us manics,

And really all of us I want to talk to,

There are four myths about meditation that keep us from doing just that.

The first myth,

That meditation is hard.

Meditation isn't hard.

At its most simple,

Meditation is sitting down and appreciating your breath.

Can we all do that?

That's not hard to do,

Right?

But for us manics,

The struggle comes in being present.

A regret,

A worry,

Something on our to-do list we forgot to do.

Our minds work best in the present.

That's when they're most clear,

Most creative,

Most aware.

And yet us manics have trained them to not be present,

To be in not now.

I like to think that it's kind of like a defense mechanism,

That in the rat race of life our minds become just a defense against being now,

Because we fear the vulnerability that now might make us.

Meditation can change that.

That's how important it is.

It can give you your life back again.

And it's not hard.

It's easy.

All you have to do is sit and appreciate something or many things.

Your breath.

A candle flame.

Your whole body.

A contemplative thought.

Now I love what I'll call the meditation marketplace,

But it also has a big problem.

At a subjective level,

It needs you to think meditation is hard so it can sell you stuff.

You must be in a pretzel-like position.

Buy this book.

Sit up straight.

Learn this mantra.

Meditation is a workout for the soul.

Do it hard,

Man.

Work it.

And don't get me wrong.

It's all good.

But when in doubt,

Just sit down and shut up and appreciate whatever is there for you to appreciate.

And guess what?

You're meditating.

The second myth.

The goal of meditation is total peace,

Or even enlightenment.

How am I supposed to be at peace when everyone at work is yelling?

I'm in endless traffic and I can't escape the news cycle.

Well the answer is,

You're not.

You're not supposed to be at total peace.

It's okay if you're not a candidate to be the next Dalai Lama.

You don't have to be.

But how about a little bit more peace?

Dan Harris,

That famous anchor from Nightline who wrote a fantastic book called 10% Happier,

He goes on well to describe the inner narrator,

Which can often keep us from feeling at peace.

He shares,

To be clear,

I'm not talking about hearing voices.

I'm talking about the internal narrator,

The most intimate part of our lives.

The voice comes braying in as soon as we open our eyes in the morning and then heckles us all day long with an air horn.

It's a fever swamp of urges,

Desires,

And judgments.

It's fixated on the past and the future,

To the detriment of the here and now.

It's what has us reaching into the fridge when we're not hungry,

Losing our temper when we know it's not really in our best interest,

And pruning our inboxes when we're ostensibly engaged in conversation with other human beings.

Our inner chatter isn't all bad,

Of course.

Sometimes it's creative,

Generous,

Or funny.

But if we don't pay close attention,

Which very few of us are taught how to do,

It can be a malevolent puppeteer.

And for me,

This is such a key with meditation.

It's not about creating peace,

It's about revealing peace.

It's clearing the mind not through ceasing to think,

But by thinking more clearly.

It's about making sure those thoughts are our own,

And not someone or something else's.

Because if you can't be with the voice in your own head,

What can you be with?

You lose yourself.

And this is what happened to Dan Harris.

His ultimate conclusion is that meditation isn't a silver bullet answer.

It's not here to save you,

But it will make everything about 10% better.

And I think that's a great point for all of us in the spiritual living business.

Stop striving for perfection,

And start striving for a little bit more every day.

I think in the end we'll find that that's what perfection really is.

A third myth.

Meditation takes too long.

To be an effective meditator,

I have to have my eyes closed and say oom for like 20 minutes.

First off,

Beware the spiritually buff.

Yeah,

I'm up to an hour and 15 minute meditation every day.

You should try it.

I'm so one with God right now.

So one.

I wish you could see my theta brain waves.

They're sick.

I have seen zero evidence that a longer meditation is better than a quality meditation.

And obviously quiet time is a luxury when you've got a to-do list burning a hole in your pocket or kids screaming and hanging around your neck.

It's okay to be spiritually flabby.

As your meditation for the manic instructor,

I'm telling you that a 5 minute meditation is more than enough.

Just shoot for 3-5 minutes.

Sit and appreciate your breath.

And if you want a little bit more,

Say an affirmative prayer or just set some anchoring intentions for your day.

As you go on each day,

You can go longer.

And it might help,

But it's not quantity,

It's quality.

It's not length,

But depth.

A fourth myth.

You can't be distracted to meditate well.

This is the biggest excuse I hear for people not meditating.

Not only can I not find the time,

But I can't find the quiet,

Externally or internally.

A quiet space is preferred,

But it isn't absolutely necessary.

For there is no thing is no distractions.

There's no such thing as a distraction-free environment or meditation.

Be it a screaming child,

Construction work,

Your own chatter.

The goal in meditation is never to not be distracted,

But to always come back to focus.

It's not about not knowing,

But it's all about returning.

When you get distracted,

Allow no self-barratement.

Just get back to your meditation.

Meditation for the manic isn't always calm and serene.

See it's often not the manic,

The busy,

The anxious,

The overly conscientious that we have to worry about.

It is the calm and serene.

Why so calm?

Do you not have a job?

Is Aunt Bea caring for your children?

Do you not realize we are on a whirlwind of gas called a planet hurling through space?

To begin to see calm and serene,

Not as states of being,

But qualities that we can cultivate in the midst of our busy lives,

Is to realize that even in the ultrafulness of our everyday lives,

There are linings of grace and moments of remembering the sacred.

Meditation for the Manic,

Part 2.

Keep it Simple.

If you are a manic trying to meditate,

Best to keep it simple.

Although including a bit more than meditation,

This is how I do my spiritual practice in the morning.

Well,

Ideally.

I wake up.

I start the coffee.

I take a quick shower.

I grab said coffee.

I grab a book and I find a place to be alone.

Ideally the space is quiet.

But remember,

There is no such thing as absolute silence.

If you are looking for quiet,

You will never find it.

But if you are willing to be quiet,

That thing we refer to as the silence or the stillness,

It will rise up in you.

Besides my coffee,

I like to have a book with me.

I have books scattered in my home near meditation spots.

The goal of the book is not to finish it,

It's to appreciate it.

I like to keep a pen around if I want to underline or bookmark to keep my place.

But ultimately,

I want the book to be something I can open up anywhere and just read.

That's another point about the book.

It should not be some book that's trying to make some long intellectual point or tell you a long story.

It should speak words that resonate as you read them.

And back to that word,

Appreciation.

That's what the coffee is for too.

I sit down and am quiet.

And I do my best to appreciate my body,

Its breathing,

And the cup of coffee.

First off,

Coffee rumor has it that it was popularized by the Sufis to help with meditation.

Second,

It's bitter,

Black anyhow,

And there's something cool about that.

It's not a treat,

But it tastes good.

Third,

Coffee engages the senses.

Smell and taste are happy.

But again,

It's all about appreciation.

And the byproduct of that is the sense of connection,

The feeling of being present,

And often,

Centering.

That's a key point about meditation.

Meditation is the work.

Peace of mind is the byproduct.

Don't go trying to get peace of mind.

Don't go aiming at being centered.

Just meditate.

Just appreciate.

Let the rest take care of itself.

So I'm quiet with my coffee for a while,

5-10 minutes.

Then I pick up my book.

I never read more than a page or two,

And on a busy day,

Maybe just a paragraph.

Not only is the book usually good,

But if I just finish a paragraph and realize I have no memory of what I just read,

It's a good sign that I'm not paying attention.

I'm not present yet.

So I might be quiet a few more minutes,

Or just read it over again.

After I'm done reading,

I pray.

I don't ask God for stuff.

I don't say cool affirmations.

What I do is just what Emerson said.

I contemplate the facts of life from the highest point of view.

I think of my grandest ideas in that moment of what divinity is,

Of what's most sacred to me.

I think about the cosmos,

Life itself,

Love,

And connection.

Every spiritual practice is an opportunity to cast out the net of our consciousness to capture an even greater imagination of what is sacred to us and to life.

And I do that too about myself and the stuff going on in my life.

I try to see it from a higher perspective,

Or as it's often said,

From the spiritual truth.

I also know this about people I love the most.

I think about my family and my friends.

If someone is having a tough time,

I spend more time lifting them up in my consciousness.

And when my prayer is over,

That's that.

I'm done.

Personally,

As a minister,

This is my favorite time to go over or practice a talk for an upcoming Sunday.

I call it Embodying the Talk.

The idea is not to memorize,

But embody,

By not reviewing the notes,

But what I want to say within.

It's also a good time to visualize the talk in action.

Maybe for you,

If you're not a speaker,

You can visualize some other activity coming up in your work or in your life.

An upcoming date.

A presentation.

A test you have to take.

I would never give a talk without this practice.

And I would invite you to never confront something major in your life without utilizing this practice.

My goal in this Meditation for Manic series is to make meditation more attainable and accessible for all of us.

I want to share two other things I feel are essential to a successful meditation practice.

First,

Meditate every day.

No days off.

Meditation is like brushing your teeth.

Don't miss out on it.

The key to getting the byproducts of meditation is constancy of practice.

I don't care if your meditation is 5 minutes.

I don't care if it's filled with distractions.

I care that you do it consistently.

And ideally,

It's as soon as you can after you get up.

Get to it.

And if you have to do it at night or on a work break,

Just try to be consistent.

And second,

Meditate to meditate.

Let the gifts of meditation be the byproduct of meditating.

And don't meditate trying to get the benefits.

I love how Shinryu Suzuki taught this.

He called it having no gaining idea.

While you are continuing this practice,

He shares,

Week after week,

Year after year,

Your experience will become deeper and deeper,

And your experience will cover everything you do in your everyday life.

The most important thing is to forget all gaining ideas.

All dualistic ideas.

In other words,

Just practice Zazen in a certain posture.

Do not think about anything.

Just remain on your cushion without expecting anything.

Then eventually you will resume your own true nature.

That is to say,

Your own true nature resumes itself.

In my own life,

Meditation has given me myself.

And I know it can give you yourself as well.

Meditation for the Manic,

Part 3.

Don't wait.

So I've been engaging in a kind of experiment.

I'm doing my best to give up waiting.

I want to remove waiting from my life.

I know good things happen to those who wait,

But I don't think that way at all.

Inpatient is good.

Foresight is good.

But waiting for me means impatience and frustration.

I have some wonderful teachers in my life that have taught me that waiting is very much not my thing.

One teacher is my son,

Who when I say,

Are you ready to go,

He says yes,

But that doesn't really mean yes,

And yet I believe him every time.

I'm not sure why that is.

Yes for him means,

Hold on while I put on my shoes and bark on an epic search for a chapstick and while I'm at it,

I'm going to go ahead and use the restroom one more time.

The waiting drives me crazy.

Waiting is a serious problem,

And it brings out the worst in me.

My wife is a great teacher for me about waiting as well.

Now she is quick to get ready,

So I'm grateful,

And I don't get too much does this outfit make me look fat or whatever.

My waiting for my wife comes especially when we're on vacation.

I'm a doer on a trip.

Let's go,

Go,

Go.

And my wife,

She likes to kick back.

Let's relax,

She'll say.

Let's just hang out.

Let's get up and ready at our own pace,

Which means her pace of course.

Let's take our time.

All of these are code for one word to me,

Wait.

It drives me crazy.

I know for me,

Waiting is just not going to work.

I have to stop waiting.

If I could just stop waiting,

I might even become enlightened.

Okay,

Maybe not,

But I have to learn to do something else.

Joseph Campbell once shared about a conversation he had with Alan Watts.

As influential as both event on me,

They are an odd pairing.

Watts was an English gentleman turned zen beatnik who liked to drink a bottle of vodka before giving his lectures.

Campbell was a straight laced scholar who when asked how he meditated,

He replied,

I underline sentences.

Campbell was complaining about his wife.

They hadn't been married long and she was always late for things like meeting Campbell in the city.

She took the time for meeting as the time to leave the house and so on and Campbell was worried because the waiting was making him get nasty with her.

Watts told him that he had to learn to enjoy the moment he was in,

To fully appreciate it.

Campbell shared that he learned to cherish this time.

Good advice,

No?

Don't wait,

Appreciate.

Instead of waiting,

I am going to become aware of my breathing.

Instead of waiting,

I am going to pay attention to what is beautiful around me.

Instead of waiting,

I am going to write a poem.

Instead of waiting,

I am going to make a list of things that I am grateful for.

And if none of that works,

I will just go look at Facebook or play a silly game on my phone.

I have a friend named Dory who has a little dog.

And every time Dory has to go somewhere that she can't take her dog,

She has to let her dog out to do her business.

This could turn into a long wait sometimes.

And depending on when she was supposed to be somewhere,

This could create some worry,

Some stress,

And yes,

Even some frustration.

Dory knew she had to make a change.

So she decided instead of waiting,

She'd meditate.

She just let her dog be and practice meditation for a while.

And guess what?

Her dog would not only poop,

But seemingly faster.

Now,

I don't have a lot of statistical research on this,

But it fits in with ancient Taoist principles that when you let go of control and worry about something,

When you cease the tension,

The dog poops.

The wife shows up faster.

The bus arrives.

Don't wait.

Appreciate.

Don't wait.

Meditate.

Waiting never did nothing for no one.

In fact,

It only gets in the way.

The Tao Te Ching asks us,

Can you remain unmoving till the right action arises by itself?

The master doesn't seek fulfillment.

Not seeking,

Not expecting,

She is present and can welcome all things.

I have a center in my life,

And it's authenticity and appreciation.

When I'm not these things,

I'm off center.

If I'm not appreciating my life,

And if I'm not grateful,

I'm missing something.

I don't mean to say I have to be honky-dory all the time,

Because I have to be authentic,

Which means accepting of my feelings.

I can be grateful and sad,

Grateful and angry,

Grateful and ungrateful.

Get it?

And if I'm not on center,

I am in what I call defective experience.

And it has two poles for me.

One side is defined by boredom and mediocrity.

That's when I think,

There's nothing here to add.

Things are so blah and whatever.

Ugh,

I need a vacation.

I'm never more disgusted with myself than when I fall into this mode.

I mean,

I live in America in the 21st century.

I have books,

An iPhone,

Video game console,

I have friends,

And McDonald's serves breakfast all day.

And I'm bored and mediocre.

It's not life,

It's me.

I'm waiting,

For either something to happen or in the belief that nothing will.

But there's a way out.

Don't wait,

Accentuate.

Find an old book you love.

Find something you haven't cooked that's just been sitting in the cupboard for a year and a half.

Walk.

Do nothing with dedication and with awe.

The other pole I swing to is a pole of frustration and judgment.

One pole is really passive and all woe is me.

The other is really aggressive and woe is you.

I'm in line at the pharmacy and everyone is in there and they're all lost and confused but me.

They can't even stand in a straight line.

And I'm not getting what I want.

I don't have any control and I get so angry.

I get like this at home sometimes too.

Especially if I'm not taking time out to appreciate and just be.

Taking that me time to re-energize and rest.

I start taking it out on my family.

I start blaming them.

I start creating stories when I should just take a damn walk.

I love what the great Douglas Adams said,

When you blame others,

You give up your power to change.

Depression and judgment are symptoms of defective experience.

I'm waiting in the belief that I have no control when I really just won't admit I've given it to others and am now having a pity party about it.

But there is a way out.

To give your power back to yourself.

Don't wait,

Appreciate.

Don't wait for your good,

Appreciate the good that is now.

Don't wait to love,

Practice love now.

Don't wait with fear of God but have awe for God and your life now.

Don't wait to be happy.

Don't wait to be grateful.

Life is not for waiting.

It is for living.

Live it fully,

Wildly,

Kindly and with a full heart,

The best you can.

Don't wait,

Appreciate.

Don't wait,

Meditate.

Don't wait,

Accentuate.

Meditation for the Manic,

Part 4 Mindfulness for Success An essential purpose of meditation is to cultivate an inner life.

The contemplative Thomas Merton said,

When we live superficially,

When we are always outside ourselves,

Never quite with ourselves,

Always divided and pulled in many directions by conflicting plans and projects,

We find ourselves doing many things that we do not really want to do,

Saying things we do not really mean,

Needing things we do not really need,

Exhausting ourselves for what we secretly realize to be worthless and without meaning in our lives.

Our goal is to become aware of inner life within us.

Some call it the unconscious or subjective side of ourselves,

But mystics,

Including Jesus,

Have taught that we can also discover our connection with a holy presence within ourselves and through that holy presence we can also experience an affinity for or even a sense of oneness with all life.

This in short is enlightenment.

This in short is heaven on earth.

Knowing you are one with God and through the experience of that oneness and awareness of being one with everyone and everything else.

Nirvana is living with that knowing.

Your exterior life and your inner life in harmony.

Enlightenment does not mean you have some sort of spiritual superpower.

I'm one with God,

Now I'm going to kick some ass.

No,

It's nothing complicated.

Enlightenment means keeping it simple.

Remember,

The goal is not to become one with God,

But to patiently awaken to the fact that you already are.

To create the space,

The openness,

The vulnerability,

The transparency,

The intimacy within yourself to allow God to awaken in you.

Thus,

Living a meditative life,

Our first goal is awareness.

Just to be mindful,

This is the first level of mindfulness,

Awareness.

Take a few minutes in the morning,

Close your eyes,

Feel your breath,

Appreciate the moment.

Like a train changing tracks,

Your thoughts will turn inward.

Move from defensive to receptive,

From projected to reflective.

There you are,

Your inner life.

This is the secret of meditation and mindfulness.

It's not about the time and silence,

It's what you do with it after.

The real meditation is your ability to maintain a sense of inner life into and throughout your day.

Close your eyes and think about a moment in which you were most proud.

A time when you remembered your relationship with the sacred.

Now,

How long can you carry the essence of this knowing,

Of this moment with you?

That's what meditation is like.

Instead of living superficially,

Our life controlled by the exterior of schedules,

Media,

Traffic signals,

And unconscious mood swings,

We are sincere.

We have basic awareness.

We have ownership over our own composure.

And do you know what I mean by that?

Self-awareness,

Active self-awareness.

It helps you to be an individual in your life instead of just a victim of it.

This is one of the great ways you can use mindfulness for success in your life.

You can approach normal things and bring sincerity to them.

Awareness,

Creativity,

Even joy.

When you have real mindfulness,

You don't just go through the motions,

You bring yourself into the mundane and your uniqueness begins to shine.

As you continue a meditation practice,

What most practitioners notice is what is generally called the witness.

The witness is the second level of mindfulness.

The witness is like your awareness looking into a mirror and becoming aware of itself.

You become aware of being aware of being aware.

Ken Wilber would say,

You can indeed be aware of your body,

But you can also be aware of your mind.

You can right now notice all the thoughts and ideas and images floating in the front of the mind's inward eye.

Only by bringing awareness to the mind can you begin to transcend the mind and be free of its limitations.

Now I've never not been stuck with myself,

But I get his point.

Did you ever feel like you're being watched by God's transcendent eyeball?

Like it's judging you?

Very uncomfortable in the shower,

Right?

Well the witness is like that,

But it's you.

And hopefully it's free from judgment.

Freud called that perceived eye,

The superego.

It's a judgmental God if you grew up religious,

Or it's your abusive parent or strict teacher.

But if you're spiritually dialed,

Aware of your inner life,

It's just you.

Without judgment,

Aware of yourself.

The witness is cool.

Now pragmatically,

This may sound woo woo,

But it's changed my life.

Because I can be angry and also behold myself being angry from a part of me that's not.

I can be frightened,

Worried,

Sad,

But from a place that is more than that.

I can be confused and clear as a bell that I'm confused.

This is the key to possessing your issues instead of having your issues possess you.

This helps at work.

It helps with your spouse and with your parents and with your kids.

The danger of the witness is when you forget to be what you're witnessing.

Some people,

They get so set and comfortable in observing life that they forget to live it.

Don't be one of those people.

They're not as annoying as the thought police,

But they're just as nauseating.

The other danger of the witness is that you have to take responsibility for your own behavior.

You can no longer claim to have not been yourself.

No,

I was not myself.

No,

I don't know what I was thinking.

Yes,

You do.

Because you just watched yourself do that.

Now there's yet another level I have found through meditation and mindfulness practice.

I think I'd call it knowingness.

In short,

It's when the witness isn't just aware,

But it's aware with the knowing of a higher truth.

Mindfulness can be aware of sadness,

But the knowingness can hold a place of gratitude.

You can be aware of anger,

But also of an immense love.

You can be aware of fear,

But also deep trust.

Mindfulness can be aware of sadness,

But the knowingness can hold a place of gratitude.

I am so grateful that there seems to be a part of me that is always in touch with a greater truth.

It is often not the all of me,

But that it's even a part of me is a big deal sometimes.

Our bodies are very important,

But I like to think we just have lots of bodies,

Just like many spiritual traditions teach.

A body of form that desires health,

And food,

And survival.

An emotional body that desires safety and peace.

An intellectual body that desires to know and understand.

And a spiritual body that seeks to express the divine in all that we do,

That seeks to be blessed in a blessing in this world.

For me,

You need all of the bodies,

But I'm so grateful to have the spiritual one.

When I'm in fear about a meeting or what's going to happen next,

That's a time for me to be aware of that body that's in gratitude always.

That is always ready to express the spirit of itself.

A better definition of mindfulness for me would not be an awareness of what you're doing but of who you're being in what you're doing.

When you're in a problem,

The question,

What am I to do,

Is not always the best question.

The better question is often,

Who am I called to become?

It's who you become that becomes more the creative factor than what you choose to do.

That's mindfulness for success.

From awareness,

To witness,

To knowingness,

And finally,

To being fully who you are,

Wholly and entirely in your life.

Meditation for the Manic,

Part 5 – The 5 Types of Dysfunctional Meditation Today,

I want to share with you 5 types of dysfunctional meditation.

As dysfunctional as meditation can be,

However,

I also want to point out that dysfunctional meditation is better than no meditation at all,

And how the dysfunctional can actually be a bridge to a meditation practice filled with a greater sense of connection and clarity of mind.

The first type of dysfunctional meditation I'll call no meditation.

This is,

I don't want to do it meditation.

The meditation that feels like the most boring thing in the world meditation.

The idea of sitting still makes me rather want to be electrically shocked meditation.

However,

No meditation reveals something important,

A complete distrust of our own mind,

Body,

And the present moment.

It reveals indeed that in many ways,

The quaking of our anxiety,

The non-stop nature of our thinking,

And the constant resistance to being present are but defense mechanisms against the intimacy of now.

Thomas Merton spoke to the fear of silence.

That it's more than that,

It's the fear of being alone.

It's the fear of moving past the surface bullshit of our thinking to go deeper,

To find out what we really think and believe,

Or discover what we fear,

That there may be nothing there.

No meditation,

A meditation filled with feelings of resistance,

Is dysfunctional in that it seeks to do the opposite of what meditation is for.

It seeks to be anything but now,

When the purpose of meditation is to be fully present.

However,

Resistance is a sign that there is a part of you that knows that if you give in fully to meditation,

This who you think you are that survival is oh so important is in danger of being lost,

To a new and better,

Clearer and more emphatic you.

As Alan Watts put it,

Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always derived at in the immediate moment.

A second kind of dysfunctional meditation is,

Oh shit meditation.

This is the kind of meditation that begins with remembering something you forgot to do that you were supposed to do,

Or remembering something you are supposed to do that you don't want to forget.

Now this is a very helpful thing,

But it's not meditation.

The purpose of meditation is to help us be in the now,

Not to remember all the things that are keeping us from being there.

That being said,

In my own experience,

My meditation can't help but be oh shit meditation sometimes,

So I often like to keep a notepad nearby,

So if I fear I won't remember after meditation is over,

I write it down and get back to my meditation.

I think too many of us dwell on our problems in meditation.

As much as our problems need solving,

There is no better time to let them go in meditation.

In my experience,

I don't have to worry,

They'll always be waiting for me after.

Something powerful oh shit meditation can reveal is that the things we were supposed to or are supposed to do lie on the surface of our waking consciousness,

But these thoughts are just at the tip.

Meditation can help us go deeper and deeper through the thinking mind and to the creative intelligence,

The place of ideas,

Of deeper feelings,

Of spirit.

Krishna Murti said,

Meditation is not a means to an end,

It is both the means and the end.

Another way of putting that is to say that in meditation,

I am releasing my own attachment to my life as I see it,

The to-do lists and so forth,

To enter into an experience of a deeper strand of life itself.

It is not the life I am living,

But the life that is living me.

To be with this life is meditation,

And the byproduct is to bring the power of this life into everyday activities,

Not the other way around.

A third kind of dysfunctional meditation we might call escape meditation.

Any activity we do can be used to awaken or escape.

Awaken more mindfully to what is here and now,

Or numb us out,

Not to be present and to pretend not to be at all.

That is why an activity that can be good for one,

Could be not so good for someone else.

This is also true of meditation.

Escape meditation actually uses meditation to not be present,

To daydream,

To worry about stuff,

To try and turn off.

I find it kind of misleading when I hear people say that the goal of meditation is to still the mind or to stop thinking.

Krishnamurti also spoke about the difference between thought and intelligence.

Thought is one form of intelligence.

But in meditation we are trying to move past putting intelligence into language and to just experience intelligence itself,

That creative mind.

When we are trying to escape,

We are trying to rest in a thought of illusion and what is not real.

When back that very thought,

There is something very real,

Intelligence itself,

That when we tap into it in meditation,

It can help us realize greater creativity,

Connection,

Mindfulness and growth.

Don't stop your mind.

Unleash your mind.

Don't stop thinking.

Think clearly.

Don't stop existing.

Start being more truly you.

Charlotte Joko Beck said,

Zen practice isn't about a special place or a special peace,

Or something other than being with our life just as it is.

It's one of the hardest things for people to get,

That my very difficulties in this very moment are the perfection.

When we are attached to the way we think we should be or the way we think anyone else should be,

We can have very little appreciation of life as it is.

Whether or not we commit physical suicide,

If our attachment to our dream remains unquestioned and untouched,

We are killing ourselves,

Because our true life goes by almost unnoticed.

Then there is blame meditation,

Which I guess we could call FU meditation.

Blame meditation is where you sit down to meditate and stew about how you cannot meditate in peace because of someone or something getting in your way.

Hell,

My meditation has been hacked.

And so in blame meditation,

You stew and stew until you get close to blowing up.

It doesn't hurt anyone else but you.

And that can be the revealing part of blame meditation.

Blaming others takes away your own ability to give yourself peace of mind.

When your peace of mind belongs to someone else,

You are in deep trouble.

When it is possessed by the construction going on next door,

Or the person who hasn't gotten back to you,

Or how humid it is outside,

You've lost conscious choice.

It is then that meditation can become again about getting back to clarity,

To present,

To peace of mind.

In this way,

Meditation is an opportunity to step out of the life of being a victim to someone else's behavior,

Conscious or unconscious,

And back into anchoring yourself into a creative and assertive way of life.

Meditation in this sense is a natural form of forgiveness.

The last kind of dysfunctional meditation I'm going to call I'm all that meditation.

This is the meditation that you use to make yourself feel spiritual.

See,

You shouldn't have to act spiritual.

So this kind of inauthentic high and mighty meditation can separate you from your sincerity and inflate you in false images.

This is the meditation the person who thinks meditating longer or harder is going to produce greater results.

Meditation is not about length,

But depth.

Not about how hard or good you are at it,

But how dedicated and present you are,

Even when you're feeling like a mess.

If your meditation is an attempt to make you someone you are not already now,

It's lost.

The byproduct of daily meditation is to make you more what you are already.

What's your image of a holy person?

What's your idea of enlightenment?

What does living a perfect spiritual life look like to you?

Now ponder the possibility that those very images are the very thing that keep you from your own holiness,

From being spiritual.

Holiness is self-acceptance.

Enlightenment is awareness coupled with compassion.

A spiritual life is your life today.

Are you living it or hoping for an altered state?

Edward Villon said,

Sitting in quietness without a fixed agenda is a way of encouraging ourselves to take in the imperfections of life with a little more gentleness,

Less embarrassment,

Shame or self-criticism.

I don't know about you,

But that sounds like a fine idea to me.

Reviews

Not manic myself. However, I could certainly relate to some parts & most definitely understand my manic counterparts (who meditate, BTW), even more. There is a plethora of knowledge here, which I will,apply to self. So insightful, you are! Thank you. Namastè🍃

This is a perfect reminder message, especially when meditation is a challenge… which is a lot of the time! It’s a solid anchor for seasoned meditators as well as beginners. Thanks, Rev Josh!