What’s the point of meditating? (part 1)

Yes, meditating regularly will in all likelihood make you feel better. But meditation is not a self improvement program. It cannot be. If you are chasing self improvement, measurable gains and more happiness, you will never keep up the practice. Meditation is not about the experience, it is about the meditator. Nor does it require fancy or even different circumstances and environments than where you are right now. Meditation is surrendering to what is here already.

We might well come to meditation thinking “Surely this will help me find a shelter in the storm: just a few minutes quiet and stillness and then I will be able to step out of my turmoil, my pain and all my suffering and continual disappointments. Life will become easy, the hurt will cease and the tears dammed.” Well I am sorry, but if this is you, then you are going to be frustrated. Meditation has little influence on the amount of crap that will come raining down on you from outside. People will still walk out of your life, there will be loss and death and repetitive let downs echoing through the days of your life. You will receive what you don’t want and be lacking in the events, companions and feelings you desire. All these things will still occur but how you may meet and hold them can change. And this is the beauty of it.

“The point is not to feel less. The point is to stop using our pain as an excuse to cause more pain.” Ven. Robinha

Instead the first intention of meditation is ‘simply’ to get to know our mind. And for this I am taking mind as “the capacity to be aware and to know” and this definition also includes all the mental factors that rise with each moment of knowing. Things like love, anger, joy, compassion, disillusion, boredom, contentment etc etc.

None of these words mean that much without actually stepping into the laboratory. So please do try this 2 minute meditation. You can do it exactly where you are. You and this present moment is all that is needed.

What happened? Was the mind steady? What were emotions were present? Did they remain the same throughout or did they change? What about thoughts? Did they stay or come and go? Was there awareness for longer sections or just for moments or hardly at all? Since sit to get an idea of what the mind is doing whatever happened is good. There is no such thing as a bad practice. You are getting to know the territory of your mind. Nearly always the first quality that becomes apparent is that what we notice and are aware of alters all the time.

And here is the first reason to meditate. Maybe the one that underpins all the others*.We sit to make sense of all that is happening in our mind.

For if we can observe the mind, we can start to know it and if we can start to know it we can start to understand it and therefore also what is behind everything that we are. “The mind is the forerunner of all things.” said The Buddha and even just a two minute practice is an effective, clear and simple method to peer curiously toward that

If that sounds like a discouragingly long task,then you should also know – and probably have experienced in those two minutes – that at the end of every wandering and contracting thought, the mind returns to where you had intended it to be. Right there is mindfulness and awareness of the present moment. You can notice and ask ‘How is it to have awareness of the present moment?’ Because you have meditated and you have been aware and you have learnt. How fantastic is that?

*Though I think you could argue love underpins this making sense or at the very least walks hand in hand with it wherever it goes. But more of that in a future post which i will link here when I write it.