Why Meditation

The popular conversation around meditation is that it's good for reducing stress and developing a calm and relaxed state.  Which is true enough.  But that comes from a particular perspective on meditation, one that derives a lot from Zen Buddhism and the translation of that into a Western-oriented and Western-accessible practice.

Herbert Benson, MD, a cardiologist and founder of the Mind/Body Medical Institute at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, especially moved forward the idea of integrating spirituality within medicine, and developed the relaxation response.  He popularized a holistic approach to medical care that transformed how patients and medical practitioners alike understood the healing process.

And much of the relaxation response thinking, in combination with a mindfulness approach defines the majority of meditative practices in America.  Guided meditation commentaries abound all over the Internet, and meditation instruction is a Google-search away.

But my experience with meditation isn't about relaxation or stress reduction.  My own experience with spirituality isn't simply about quieting or calming my mind.  Those are useful steps in spiritual practice, but my own experience is about moving toward completion, cultivating the qualities and virtues that lie within me but are underutilized or neglected.

Reducing stress and anxiety and all the negative feelings and emotions helps, but it's not nearly enough to nourish the soul.  It's like removing junk food from your diet: a good start, but not nearly enough to get you healthy.  You have to add in fresh fruits and veggies and all kinds of other good-for-you foods, and then you have a healthy diet.

My experience with meditation is that it sets the stage for not being distracted by my own limiting thoughts so that I can actually open my mind and heart to the unlimited power that is available from G*d...unlimited love and peace and joy, which are available to me when I plug myself in.

Lowering the volume on the noise and distraction inside my head isn't the endgame.  It's just the start.  It's just the beginning of tapping into a source of spiritual energy far greater and far richer than I can manufacture on my own.  It's just the beginning of seeing what I really need, the places I'm empty or lacking or what I'm missing, and letting that spiritual power wash over me and fill me up. It's just the beginning of acknowledging that, as an ordinary human being, I have potential, and a capacity for spiritual completeness, but that's not the place I am right now, and I'm going to have to do some actual work to get there.

There are so many ways to understand G*d and so many discussions that can be had about theology, but my experience is that G*d is this unlimited light, unlimited love, and an unlimited source of all the things I need to fill myself with.  And meditation is simply exposing myself to the warmth and light that's being offered, and letting it transform me, which, by its very nature, it's designed to do.

Why Awareness Matters

Mindfulness is a term that those even casually acquainted with meditation are familiar with. It's a concept that's been around for thousands of years and had made its way to the West with great flair.  It's at the heart of a lot of practices seeking to reduce stress and enhance calm relaxation.

But there's another, deeper reason for mindfulness, and that's the kind of acceptance and awareness that comes with it.  Begin to sit quietly with yourself, and non-judgmentally observe what arises in your thoughts and feelings, and you'll see it isn't all about calm relaxation.  Seriously - go ahead and do it.  Sit with yourself and see what comes up.

For a lot of us, there are thoughts and feelings we've put aside or hidden for one good reason or another, and to try now to accept them, without judgement or fear or even concern?  Not so easy to do.  We hide from ourselves for very good reasons.  Because there are consequences to acknowledging how we are thinking and feeling, especially if we follow those thoughts and feelings to their logical conclusions and see that they are asking for some kind of change.

What if, in the back of my mind, I know I'm unhappy with my (job, marriage, kids, house, weight, friends...), and now that I'm sitting without distraction, it's apparent that I've been avoiding dealing with my discontent?  Well -what if?  Awareness is the first step in transformation, and the second is acknowledgement.

But the wonderful thing about the meditative process is that it's not boot camp.  It's not forcing you to jump into judgement OR action, to suddenly find the solution to the problem that you've only just become aware of, and have maybe, for the first time, actually acknowledged.

Meditation says sit with yourself, sit with your discontent, sit with G*d, offer it up, and see what comes back.  Do you need to take action?  Do you need to do something?  Or maybe, just in this moment, you keep sitting with yourself, getting used to this level of insight and honesty, and just letting what's been hidden emerge before you have to do anything to fix it.

Try it.  For a minute or two or 10 or 20.  Maybe happy, easy thoughts and feelings will emerge, and it will be easy to know what to do about them.  But give yourself the freedom to move into awareness, and get to know yourself deeply.  Take your time.  The best reason to slow your thoughts is so that you don't miss the important stuff.   Don't just empty your mind.  Explore it, and learn to know it and have some compassion for yourself, and you won't be sorry for a single minute you spend this way. 

Honesty Above All Else

So much of the spiritual conversation these days has a forced artificiality, a certain manufactured quality of peace and calm and serenity without the real thing.  And while I wholeheartedly seek to increase the presence of these profound qualities in my life and my nature, I know that spiritual practice (such as meditation) doesn't automatically remove my humanity, my frailty, my juiciness about life.  It doesn't limit my emotional range to only pure, positive and happy feelings.  

The real journey, the real work, has its own sort of brutality to it, a kind of gut-punch honesty that keeps you from being too precious or sentimental about the sacred.  There’s nothing spiritual about pretending to be something you're not, about trying too hard to be someone you're not, or manipulating or ignoring the reality of yourself, no matter what the intention.

The spiritual journey requires honesty above all else, and a willingness to acknowledge, accept and embrace every aspect of who you are, even the ones you want to change, even the ones about which you have guilt or fear or shame, even the ones you keep as your darkest secrets.  Or maybe it’s especially the ones you feel bad about.  If you can't face yourself, if you can’t embrace yourself, change simply isn't possible.  You cannot positively impact the thing you ignore.  Energetically it is simply impossible.

There's no easy way out, no shortcut around yourself, no escape from the you that you've created and cultivated over time.  But the reward of facing yourself, your life, your relationships, and taking responsibility for and ownership of them, frees you to possibilities you can't even imagine until you do this work. 

And once you do, you can't even imagine going back.  You can't imagine accepting limitations instead of liberation, or settling for compromise instead of cultivating cooperation.  Once you look in the mirror of your heart with honesty, you begin to see the beauty of yourself reflected back.