I’ve been told many times I should learn to meditate. Many, many times. I’ve tried many, many times including attending a 2 day silent retreat with a Buddhist nun where we starting meditating in various forms from 4.30am until dark. After wanting to die for the first 24 hours I did eventually get some Zen with it (but I still couldn’t say I was actually meditating), but if she wasn’t a Buddhist nun I may have wanted to punch her too.
On the weekend, as part of training for a company I work for, we had to meditate each morning for one hour. Now, let it be known that I have wanted to punch this particular meditation teacher before. Not that he’s been my meditation teacher always, but he has always been my teacher. And in teaching me has said things to me and looked at me in certain ways that have made something flare up inside me (like rage probably) and I have wanted to sock him one in the neck. Made worse by the fact that in hindsight he was always right. I just wasn’t always ready to hear what he had to teach me. Until I was. And then I usually hugged him and thanked him loving me enough to say the things I needed to hear even when I didn’t want to hear them.
He’s been meditating, and he wants us to learn how to meditate too, because there’s some magic in there that you can find if you are quiet enough to hear. The problem is generally, my ego is so busy running amuck it doesn’t want me to hear that stuff, and so meditating is like torture. Let’s not go into the whole ego thing yet, because although I’ve talked about my ego being a librarian called Betty before, going down the slippery path of outing my ego publically makes it flare up and tell me not to be such a motherfucking crazy woo-woo lady. So I’ll leave it until a bit after in this post and try to sneak back in then.
In fact, so far, meditation is to me like the first time I tasted red wine. I was about 20 I reckon and I’m sure it was some rank, cheap claret anyway but I recall it hitting my tongue and almost gagging and deciding that for sure the world was full of people all PRETENDING that red wine tasted good. Like pompous red-wine drinking twits all tricking each other that there was body and flavour (and not just petrol flavour) and depth and blah, blah, blah. I am serious. I thought they were all pretending. Over time, I learnt to like red wine and can enjoy a glass without lying. I can believe that other people like it without pretending. It took a few years, but it happened.
Well meditation is like that for me in that I am sure all these people are pretending it’s really cool and Zen and time goes really quick and they see or sense amazing things and they don’t create shopping lists or get so enraged they want to punch people during the process. I think they are all pretending. And that makes me madder than a cut snake and I cannot stand all that time JUST SITTING THERE. What, when I could be thinking about all the things I need to do, and how people can be tricksters and fraudsters, and that perhaps it’s all pointless anyway because what if I do nothing for an hour – I might as well just be dead. And then I think I see something and it’s moving really fast and it’s really colourful and it’s WTF and it scares the shit out of me, and so does the feeling that if I let go enough my breathing might actually stop and I’ll die, and I feel panicked and it’s so quiet in the room, and how much longer will this hour go for. And meanwhile, not a peep out of any of those other tricksters or pretenders, just golden silence and gentle breathing and letting go and it want to PUNCH SOMEONE for making me do this.
I hope that didn’t stress you out. It stressed me out writing about it. I can feel the panic. But here’s what I understand. A part of me is really scared to let go. And if I did, in the letting go the magic exists. I can go there when I write like this gentle unfolding and then a whoosh of energy and a flood of words that come from some place that is untapped and all at once they are out and I cannot for the life of me tell you where they came from. But in the quiet of meditation I (as yet) can not find the way to let go and my ego has a party in the pretend stillness and the pretend quiet (because I am still and I am quiet but inside it’s chaos, and that’s the place where ego’s like to party the most).
For people who are entrepreneurs, who work (mostly) solo, whose business or idea is them – full frontal nudity – then your ego likes a lonesome party. To stop you writing or dreaming or creating or telling the people about what you do or closing a sale that could change someone’s life. And you cannot let it tell you you cannot do it. You cannot let it hijack your meditation with craziness. You will just have to find a way to be able to do it. With determination. With consistency. With humour. With acceptance. With allowing. With the whoosh.
It’s not just meditation, it’s everything and it’s anything within which you get closer to your magic – to the place where all the other stuff doesn’t matter and there’s nothing to be scared of.
I’m going to learn to meditate. I’m going to stop trying to so to learn how to meditate and just do it. A bit at a time and then all at once. Like a good glass of red wine. And I’m not going to do that on my own, because I have always needed teachers.
And him, my meditation teacher? He has taught me so many things, and been my mentor and my teacher for many years. We need people to push us, to hold up the ugly mirror and make us look, to believe in us, to find us when we are lost, to trust and be trusted by.
Who do you have in your life that can show you the next step? If you want to find out if I could be that person for you (I promise not to punch you!) then pop your details in here and I’ll give you a call to chat about it. I reckon it’s time to let go. With a whoosh.
