I used to try to meditate; I used to try really hard. I tried all sorts. Try, try, try. But, hey, the trying kinda wrecks it. It doesn’t have to be hard. Really. Just stop trying and be. Then it’s easy; it’s like falling off a log.
Now I’m a meditation junkie. I meditate all over the space, all the time. Really, I’m a sucker for it. Cos, see/feel/hear, you don’t have to sit in the lotus position and contemplate your navel (though I love that too and actually, it is kinda like the seven course gourmet dinner rather than the quick supermarket sandwich – but hey, both have their place). Meditation is really nothing more or less than being in the now; it’s being everywhere and nowhere (baby), all over the Space, playing in Time. Meditation puts you right with yourself and right with the world.
See, I didn’t start meditating and breathing cos I was exercising and eating right – it was exactly the other way round. All thanks to my quasi-guru, of course. So, if you struggle with all the eating and exercising thing, I’d say – put it to one side for now – just breathe and meditate. Do that and I figure everything out will sort itself out.
Every morning, when I wake up, I do a small meditation, a kind of ‘Hello’ moment of waking awareness. As I walk the SP in the woods, I meditate by focusing on my steps, being a part of every footfall. I often stop at the top of the hillfort and lean into my tree with a heartfelt sigh and breathe and breathe and breathe and feel my tree breathing with me and sometimes the whole forest joins in, the trees above and the earth below, and it is pure bliss. And sometimes we all just kinda go ‘oh what the hell?’ and expand out and have a bit of a love-in with the whole fecking cosmos. And that’s usually when the dentist chooses to walk past and asks if I’m alright. J And I go, ‘Yeah. Yourself?’ And he says, ‘Looks like a nice day.’ Or whatever.
This morning I stopped by the river. Just stared at it, watching the dark shadows swarming; the little eddies turning water into kiss curls; busy, busy, busy. Knowing that underneath all that surface froth and fizz and fandango was a steady flowing, a deep knowing moving steadily, inexorably towards the sea. All that turbulent whirling just like surface mind really, all drama and worry and angst. I tell ya, I could have stayed there for hours, hours upon hours…
And, lovely thing, my dear online friend Susie whom I met for real in Israel, sent me a book a few days back. It’s called God Makes the Rivers to Flow (Passages for Meditation). She wrote in it:
‘I happened across this book in a 2nd hand store in Las Vegas & I knew it was meant for you…’
Eknath Easwaran, the guy that selected the passages in it (from a wide range of spiritual teachings) says a whole lotta wise stuff. Actually a lot of what he says echoes precisely what Marek says.
Easwaran uses the reading of spiritual passages for meditation (see, each to their own). On meditation in general he says:
‘Nothing is so direct, so potent, so sure… Meditation enables us to see the lineaments of our true self and to chip away the stubbornly selfish tendencies that keep it locked within, quite quite forgotten…’
And what does my quasi-guru say? He says...
The name of God in action (I AM), which I sang monotonously many times, making my brain generate theta waves, travelled from my mouth in all directions. But it was carried farthest by the lake surface in front of me. It couldn’t be heard by the contemporary users and guests of the Post-Camaldolite Monastery, a gem of the local historical architecture, raised in the seventeenth century on the hill of a Wigry lake island (now a peninsular), over ten kilometres away. Though sometimes I felt as if the Camaldolese monks from the past were joining my one-syllable mantra with their chants and prayers. As if the difference between the present and the past was the same as between a meditation and a prayer. The former being a wordless equivalent of the latter.’
