Today has been a challenging day. Nothing particularly bad happened; there was no great drama to speak of. And yet, most of today was energy draining rather than energy-giving. Mama said there’ll be days like this and so for the most part I have learned to take them in stride. I am grateful for the ability to notice and recognize when something is off and take affirmative steps to correct it. I am tired in body and mind and need to give them a rest. I had hoped to do a little work tonight–being in meetings all day makes it difficult to get other kinds of work done. But, my mind is too tired to focus and I’d be better served resting and working on things with a fresh mind in the morning. Tonight I spun the random number generator twice and selected a blog to excerpt for this evening. So I will take my rest and leave you with a previous posting about meditation. Enjoy!
I am grateful today for mindfulness meditation. It occurred to me when I woke this morning that I hadn’t engaged in daily meditation for some weeks; and similar to how your body feels when you haven’t eaten or exercised properly, my emotional state has been a bit sluggish. So this morning, I sat in meditation for about 30 minutes, guided gently there by an audio track from a Jack Kornfield CD titled, “Guided Meditations for Difficult Times.” It was just the right way to reestablish my stalled meditation practice and bring me back toward mindfulness as a means of living in the present moment as it unfolds. It was good to have started the day that way because the middle of the day bogged down a bit as I received another first-round rejection from a prospective employer. I will return to mindfulness before I close my eyes to sleep tonight. The next meditation on the CD is about compassion. I have a feeling that will be a good one for me to listen and meditate to before I retire.
The beauty of meditation in part lies in the fact that one must breathe while meditating. Under stressful situations, we can often forget to breathe fully. Obviously we have to breathe, it is an autonomic response–even if I hold my breath “until my face turned blue,” I’d pass out and then my breathing would start up on its own. But we often go through much of the day holding our breath or breathing shallowly, not getting enough oxygen to our brains, etc. Mindfulness meditation uses the breath as an anchor for our awareness–we pay attention to our breathing as a means of connecting to and staying in the present moment. Mindfulness encourages me to slow down,“unscrunch” my face, relax my shoulders and all those areas I’ve clamped down, tightened up, or tensed, and bring my attention to the rhythm of my breathing. It also helps me to cut down on some of the noisy, chaotic chatter of my thoughts–the incessant stream of sometimes random, scattered, intersecting ideas, memories, emotions, worries, etc. that course through my mind over the course of the day. In meditation this chatter becomes much more obvious. Trying to keep one’s attention on one’s breathing can be an incredible challenge when the mind has so many other things it wants to noodle on. As someone who struggles a bit with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), it’s a relief to hear meditation teachers say that virtually everyone first starting out in meditation has to drag their unruly minds back from the thought stream dozens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of times over a relatively short (30, 45, 60 minutes) meditation period. What a comfort to know that when it comes to meditation we all suffer from degrees of ADD!
I am recommitting myself to a daily meditation practice. I suspect I will need to continue to offer compassion and loving kindness to myself and others as I continue to sort out what I need to be doing next. Life is still uncertain; and in the midst of the uncertainty, I choose to approach it with as much equanimity as I possibly can. I am grateful to have access to teachers and to a community who can continue to guide me in developing my meditation practice. These are things I do not take for granted. So while I am out here in this area, for as long as I live here, I will take advantage of the spiritual communities I’ve found here in the Bay area. And as I’m waiting for the continued unfolding that is my life, I will remember to focus my attention on my breath and remember the beauty of living mindfully.
