Busy. Our lives, our minds sometimes even our hearts.
Lost in thought – probably a great summary of the human experience. Constantly time travelling our way through life. Never really present. Either predicting the future or mulling over the past.
Yet there’s capacity to cultivate a different way of being. More conscious, awake to our lives and not sleepwalking our way through it. John Kabat Zinn, father of modern mindfulness says, that when you miss the look in your child’s eye, you’ve missed it. And then you miss your entire life.
Meditation is not about sitting cross-legged for a few minutes a day. It is about creating space to become aware of what is happening moment by moment. It’s about noticing when you have abandoned your body and this moment and returning, with care and kindness.
Meditation is also not about having no thoughts, or a mind, free from thinking. That, in itself is almost impossible. It’s about noticing the thinking, and not becoming enmeshed in them. It’s about knowing that you are not your thoughts, and you can become aware of thinking. It’s about not believing everything that you think.
Meditation is about cultivating a wide open awareness. A spaciousness to hold the thoughts and emotions, and becoming the observer of your thinking and patterns of being. Meditation is also about dropping beneath the thinking and opening the heart. About caring and creating a loving and kind approach to yourself, others and life.
Today, being World Meditation Day, find a few moments of stillness for yourself. A few moments to pause, become present, and notice your life, as it is in this moment. This is the start.