Sometimes meditation is difficult. You’d think it’d always be easy; after all, one just sits and breathes. Right? How hard can that be? Most of us do a lot of sitting. And all of us are breathing all the time. Here’s the thing–our breathing (for the most part) is not a conscious choice that we make. It’s automatic. We can’t help it. We don’t wake up, not breathing, and decide that we’re going to start. Or in any moment, we do not have to make up our minds about whether or not to breathe. In sitting meditation, though, we sit and breathe having DECIDED to focus on the breath. We decide to be conscious of the breathing, going so far sometimes as to say or think, “I am breathing in,” followed by “I am breathing out.” Thich Nhat Hanh suggests we could even shorten that into saying or thinking “in” with the inhalation, and “out” with the exhalation. Or, he also says, one can make the consciousness of breathing into a kind of mantra: “As I breathe in, I am conscious of breathing in, as I breath out, I smile.”
This morning I wanted to meditate, but as I sat there, I found it difficult to follow the breath. My mind had other plans. Not to mention the fact that I neglected to turn off notifications on my phone, and during my session, they kept chirping, enticing me to open the eyes and forget about the fact that I was breathing. So, this morning’s meditation was a bit of a struggle. But I powered through. In between the thoughts that spun incessantly throughout that half an hour, I remembered that I was breathing in and breathing out.
My mind had other plans. It seems to me, that while over the last few days I have experienced what I thought was a major setback to my immediate, short-term creative goals, a setback that felt for awhile crippling and devastating, my brain went immediately to work in order to find solutions. As a result, just in the last 24 hours, I have made some commitments toward the progress I want to be making and have found my mind in a kind of hyper-creative state. I’m not sure what that’s about. I know it is some kind of coping mechanism, some internal safety feature, some kind of motivational rubber-band activity, a spring effect, a rebound, a recovery, I hope. It may be foolishness–but it feels good, and it was interrupting my ability this morning to concentrate on the breathing. Instead, My mind wanted to write things down, brainstorm, plan, consider options, entertain the dream. I allowed it to run free every few minutes, noticed what was happening, and returned to the breath, over and over again for 30 minutes. It was a kind of dance. All of it part of the practice.
michael jarmer 