What we believe

Why on earth would we meditate?

Why sit on a cushion for ten or twenty minutes and do absolutely nothing? What does that achieve?

Just the idea of meditation puts most people off straight away and instantly raises objections like; I haven’t got time, I’ve too much to do. I’d rather watch paint dry. Nope, not for me!

And when we do meditate it often confirms our misgivings!

The experience of meditating can trigger restlessness, boredom, or we simply get lost in our thoughts. Muscle pain can make sitting uncomfortable, or on the other hand we might just nod off!

All these experiences confirm what we already know, meditation, it’s not for me!

No doubt meditation can bring real benefits, but that takes a lot of time and commitment. Few of us are able to spend weeks or months on retreat and learn meditation from the monks & masters of the great Eastern traditions.

However, if we try meditation and confirm our doubts, if we stop and think about it we have learned something profound.

What we learn

Without doubt, one of our first observations after meditating is that we are incessant thinkers. Our thoughts are like soap bubbles, they emerge from some invisible source, hold our attention for a few seconds, and then burst to be replaced immediately by others.

If we observe each of these thoughts a little closer we notice that each comes with an emotional charge; pleasant, neutral, or unpleasant.

If a thought comes into our head about someone who made an unpleasant comment about us, then we experience anger, or hurt. That’s the purpose of emotions, they move us to act. “Well, if he’s going to be unpleasant to me, then next time I’ll be unpleasant back.”

Emotions are like a rainbow, not only are there so many different colours, but each has different shades of intensity. Intense emotions can immediately trigger a reaction.

Spend a little more time observing your thoughts, emotions, and actions, and you start to get a deeper insight into human nature. You begin to see how our behaviour is often driven by our inborn and basic human needs for; safety, shelter, sustenance, support, sex, and status.

Meditation can be difficult, boring, and uncomfortable, but when we detach ourselves from our experience and take a closer look at what we are observing, namely ourselves, we begin to get some interesting insights.

Why bother?

Only about 5% of people in the West have a regular meditation practice, so why should we?

When you begin to observe your own thoughts and emotions in meditation, and reflect on your own actions, you begin to see patterns of behaviour. We are creatures of habit, and our behaviour is habitual, whether it serves us well or poorly.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

If we don’t meditate regularly, we are far less likely to objectively observe our thoughts and emotions, and far more likely to live reactively at their whim.

We allow the tail to wag the dog.

We now live in a world in which the most precious commodity is not gold, but our attention. We can no longer remain ignorant of the billions spent on developing algorithms with the purpose of capturing and conditioning our attention. We live in a world in which addiction is the most profitable of all business models.

The problem is not the amount of screen time we are consuming, but the amount of us that is being consumed by the screen.

At the core of the problem is the fact that we are more than human beings with human needs, we are also spiritual beings with spiritual needs. When we ignore our spiritual needs, or when our actions conflict with them, we suffer.

Increasingly, as our attention spans are being eroded, we are being starved of spiritual nutrition; connection & belonging, time in Nature, health & exercise, solitude & reflection, and life’s simple pleasures like reading, music & conversation.

When we are being conditioned by our screens to seek pleasure in; alcohol, betting, streaming tv, gaming, sex, shopping, news, and social media, we are being isolated from our spiritual needs. This is increasingly leading to dissonance & disharmony, when the pursuit of pleasure conflicts with our deeper aspirations and core values.

This is the cause of our suffering, and we all suffer.

What can we do?

We can decide to mediate regularly, perhaps ten or twenty minutes a day.

It’s unlikely that we will experience enlightenment or nirvana, but every time we sit we will be reminded of the wild, untrained, nature of our mind.

We will see ourselves for what we are, thinking machines, and how our thoughts relentlessly capture our attention and drag it down some rabbit hole.

We can learn to smile when we ‘wake-up’ to the fact that our attention has been ambushed yet again, and we can congratulate ourselves on rescuing our attention.

We can start to observe our thoughts, emotions, and actions, and gain insights into the beliefs, and conditioning that lie behind them.

With practice and concentration we can begin to increase our attention span and become more emotionally resilient.

There will be times when our minds are restless and refuse to quieten, when we feel bored, uncomfortable, and frustrated. However, there will also be times of stillness, quiet, and joy.

Most importantly we will begin to straighten out the tangled knots of our consciousness, and we will be less vulnerable to the snares & traps that the digital world sets for us.

What can we achieve?

With intention, effort, and consistency we can build a meditation practice that will lead to sustainable change, we will become a better version of ourselves.

In prioritising and giving time to our spiritual needs, we can enjoy the gifts of meditation.

Freedom from the strong forces of habitual, compulsive, and addictive behaviour. Peace of mind from living our lives in closer alignment with our spiritual needs.
Happiness that suffuses our mind, body, and soul.

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You are not a drop in the ocean; you are the ocean in a drop

Our soul wants to go home; meditation is the path that brings our soul home.

Until we bring our soul home, our innate restlessness will not go away. When we do, we will find happiness, peace & freedom. Our soul is part of the Universal Soul, this is its home, this is where it belongs.

The pursuit of happiness is a fundamental human drive, hard-wired into us from birth. Our desire for happiness fuels our thoughts & actions. However, our mind & body often look for happiness & freedom in different places from our heart & soul, and sometimes this leads to conflict.

It is this conflict, when the thoughts & actions of our mind & body do not align with the needs & desires of our heart & soul, that we experience disharmony & dissonance, and this is often the cause of emotional suffering.

We are all eternal souls born into a mind & body that has evolved since the dawn of life, and each of us must find a way for our mind & body to live in harmony with our heart & soul.

We are born with fundamental human drives, yet in the West we find it difficult to accept that each of us carries the baggage of previous incarnations. What we can agree on though is the concept of conditioning, we are conditioned from birth by both our nature & nurture.

Our conditioning leads each of us to develop individual tendencies, where a tendency is a natural inclination to think or act in a certain way. It is these tendencies that fuels our habits, desires, and temperament.

Our conditioning & tendencies steer our thoughts & actions in habitual directions to satisfy our needs & desires. It is the outcome of our thoughts & actions that drives our emotional state, this is the way we feel about ourselves, others, and the world around us.

Under the same circumstances, on some days we feel happy & fulfilled, and yet on other days we feel utterly dejected & miserable, such is the consequence of living our life at the whim of our thoughts. This constant see-saw of emotions sucks the life out of the best of us, leaving us further at the mercy of our thoughts and reactions.

Thoughts are good servants but poor masters.

Resigned to living reactively at the behest of our thoughts, our massive potential withers. We, the creatures of vast oceans, resign ourselves to our fate in the goldfish bowl.

We can unleash our mind and harness its power to live a life of fulfilment & achievement. We can bring our soul home to where it belongs. Meditation is the way.

Meditation is taming our flow of consciousness.

Consciousness is the flow of life, we experience its existence daily in the changing landscape of our thoughts & emotions. We swing from elation to despair, when nothing outside seems to have changed at all.

Meditation helps to straighten out the knots in our consciousness. It helps to calm the tides of emotions that afflict us in the ocean of life. To tap into our full potential we must go beyond the incessant chattering of our mind, first we have to wipe the slate clean.

The only way to taste the fruits of meditation is to do it right, to do it properly.

We can find a way for our mind & body to live in harmony with our heart & soul. We can experience real & lasting happiness & freedom. Let’s follow the guidance of the gurus and yogis that have gone before us, let’s follow the path of meditation together.

*The above is a distillation of the Introduction of ‘a million Thoughts’, by Om Swami. It is the book that we will use as guidance to begin & build our meditation practice together. I hope you join me.