Mind Calm (15 page)
Do you want mind calm or do you want every meditation to look and feel exactly how you think it should? Unfortunately, having preconceived ideas about what must happen when you meditate can lead to frustration and may make you want to quit before getting the results you want. To enjoy practising Mind Calm, I recommend that you embrace the three ideal attitudes outlined in this chapter. These attitudes become more important, not less, the more you meditate. Trust me, inadvertently it is easy to become rigid in your routine, and try to force specific happenings on your meditation practice to your mind's liking. It is natural to want to experience calm stillness when you meditate, but to develop peace with mind, it is vitally important that you adopt the following meditation mind-sets for all your open- and closed-eye Mind Calm practice.
Mind-set 1: What's going to happen?
Once I was in a relationship with a woman who had a young child. When the little girl started walking, she would often come into my office, plant her feet firmly on the ground and with wide-open excited eyes say, âWhat's going to happen?' I would turn to her with a big smile and similar wide-open eyes and say back to her, âWhat's going to happen?' She'd then dance on the spot from sheer excitement and joy. To this day, I still remember fondly how wonderfully innocent she was and how her excitement for life was so contagious and enlivening.
When I started meditating more regularly I forgot her lessons in innocence and being curious. I forgot to be excited about not knowing what was going to happen. Instead, I started to try to force my will. I would sit down to meditate and without realizing, attempt to make my meditation look and feel how my mind thought it should. This quickly led to an inner struggle against anything that happened outside the parameters of my preconceived ideas about what the perfect meditation should be like. Instead of being innocently curious like a child, I would judge and resist what happened, which only made my meditations counterproductive and stressful.
Boredom would also creep into my meditations too, due to my lack of curiosity. Lacking an attitude of exploration and observation, I would give my attention to the commentator in my mind saying that I had so many other more fun and interesting things that I could be doing, rather than sitting with my eyes closed meditating.
Boredom is a by-product of not being
present and lacking an attitude of
âWhat's Going to Happen?'
Whenever you are bored you have stopped being present and begun thinking. By shifting into a more curious mindset, your meditation will immediately become more enlivening and enjoyable. You will find being curious is also a great way to be alert. The more alert you are (engaging GAAWO) the fewer thoughts you will naturally have and mind calm will abound.
Hand in hand with boredom is clock-watching. When a person forgets to be fully engaged and curious, they can end up less attentive to what's happening now and more concerned with making sure they get through the 20- or 30-minute meditation sitting that they'd planned. This âgetting to the end' approach ends up missing the point of meditating, which is to savour the moment you're in.
Watch out for this common Time Trap. If you are clock-watching then you can be sure you're lacking the optimal mind-set for getting the most from meditation. Time really does fly when you're having fun. Take a moment to consider a hobby that you absolutely love. When engaged with your hobby, time disappears and hours can pass because of your total engrossment in the task at hand. The same can be the case for meditation. It need not be a means to an end or a monotonously dull daily routine that you do because you know you should. It can be a joy-filled adventure through timeless unbounded consciousness.
The choice between dullness and delight can be yours, by adopting a âWhat's Going to Happen?' attitude.
Linking back to the common meditation happenings, without a mind-set of âBring It On' (or should I say, âBring It OM!'), then meditating can quickly become a struggle. For the best results, you need to be willing to let everything happen with unconditional allowing. Catch yourself if you ever sit down to meditate with any of the following intentions:
- I hope I don't have a busy Calm Sitting.
- I hope these uncomfortable emotions go away.
- I hope there're no external noises or distractions.
- I hope I don't fall asleep again.
- I hope I don't think about any bad memories.
- I hope no uncomfortable physical sensations happen.
The list can go on and onâ¦
By being attached to how your meditation looks and resisting it when it doesn't go to your mind-made plan, you can end up in an inner struggle instead of serenity. You will fight the natural tendencies of your mind and body and become attached to things always being to your liking. Remember, attachment happens when you believe x, y or z will make you happier, peaceful, loved, etc. Attachment buys into the illusion that things need to change before you can enjoy these human pleasures. However, the reality of the situation is the exact opposite.
By letting go of needing things to be any fixed way, your mind becomes calmer and the lack of resistance allows for more enjoyable states of being to come to the forefront of your individual life experience.
When I first learned to meditate, I excitedly rushed home for my first private meditation. I recall sitting down on my brand new meditation cushion, lighting a candle and closing my eyes. Without a word of a lie, within a minute of me beginning, a really loud road drill started thumping away at the hard concrete outside my bedroom window! I immediately started judging and resisting the noise. I remember thinking:
This is so typical, I can't meditate with all this noise happening, I think I will stop for now and try again later
. Listening to my mind that day, I got up and walked away from a golden opportunity to practise being at peace with my thoughts about the noise.
Awareness of sound is a thought so let
it go to return to the silence within.
Instead of treating the sound as just another thought, I continued with my meditation journey believing I needed external quiet to find inner silence. As a result, I became irritated every time I noticed noises happening when I was trying to meditate. It turns out the same went for all the other mind-made rules that I'd picked up along the way with regards to how I could enjoy some peace. I believed I needed to stop my thoughts, be void of emotions, never be physically uncomfortable, and make my external life circumstances perfect, for peace to be possible. Hopefully
by now, you can see this is not so. Engaged in such an approach, it's hard not to become controlling when trying to force your mind, body and life to be your idea of perfect so you can eventually enjoy some calm. However, the simple antidote to postponing your peace until things are different, better and improved is simply to adopt a mindset of âBring It On'.
Now, if noise happens I let it. If thoughts want to float through my mind, I let them. If emotions are present in my body, I welcome them. And if I ever get physical sensations that my mind might judge as negative, I see the judgement and let my body do whatever it needs. If I've been lost in thinking for a few minutes, I don't look back to judge it, instead I take a moment to be grateful for being awake to the present moment once again.
Irrespective of what happens, the simple
strategy for it not to be a problem is
to let it go and keep GAAWOing.
Meditation works if you maintain a regular practice. Perhaps paradoxically, it is simultaneously a quick fix while also being a long-term winning strategy. Engaging GAAWO creates immediate mind calm, but if you want to make it a habit then you must keep doing it!
Your mind has loved being the centre of your attention and it might not accept relegation to the sidelines without a bit of a tantrum first. Be ready for your mind to say that you're too busy today to meditate or it's not
working. Prepare yourself for your mind finding fault in the actual Mind Calm techniques too. It wants you to keep searching for the next technique and then the next. For the best results, commit to practise even if at times when you don't see the point.
I promise you that if you keep GAAWOing, then one year from now you will be experiencing so much more calm and contentment compared to if you don't get started or keep up your daily routine.
Let's face it, the next year is going to happen whether you meditate or not, so you may as well set yourself up for a much happier future by investing some time every day in your Mind Calm practice.
Desiring peace is natural and beautiful. The remarkable news is that enjoying peace for life is possible. Yet, despite this exciting possibility, always remember: life is only ever happening now, so peace for life is 100 per cent about being still now. If you want your experience of calm to be consistent then simply make it your number one priority to be inwardly attentive to still silent space now. Let the future take care of itself. The only thing that matters is where your attention is right now. Ask yourself:
Am I putting most of my attention on movement or stillness, sound or silence, stuff or space?
If you find yourself caring whether your mind calm is permanent or not, it means that your attention has slipped away from the presence of your consciousness now and gone into the future via your mind. Be here now. Be still now, and you will find that peace is permanently present - it always has been!
Playing with Mind Calm consistently will help you to notice that you experience a sense of calm every time you become aware of the underlying still silent spacious reality of the present moment.
Your awareness is the permanent aspect to
you and your awareness is still and calm.
Beautifully, you can discover that peace never left you; rather, you left peace, simply by taking your attention away from this moment by engaging in thoughts, emotions, physical sensations and ever-changing life circumstances.
I encourage you to play fully with Mind Calm with the curiosity of a young child and be open to whatever happens. The result of saying âBring It On' to every aspect of human life is mind calm, love and heaps of happiness. Although âBring It On' is such a simple strategy for serenity, I cannot emphasize its importance enough. It's a master key to getting peace with your mind, peace with your emotions and ultimately peace with your life. So much so that it sits at the heart of the protocol that I'm going to share now for getting peace with any problem that you may encounter along your wayâ¦
Getting peace with any problem is possible by healing your relationship with your mind's thoughts and emotions about the issue. Instead of working hard to change your mind to get peace with past events, current concerns or future fears, for example, you can be free now without having to engage in any intellectual convincing or therapy. Mind Calm and the principles that sit at the heart of the technique need not be used passively. On the contrary, it can be applied in a dynamic way for immediate relief from any problems that you may be currently facing.
Using my âpeace with mind' approach on specific issues requires a totally new mind-set compared to the more traditional therapeutic approaches available. Let's compare the therapy mind-set with Mind Calm:
| Therapeutic mind-set | Mind Calm mind-set |
| There's something wrong with my life and me. | There is nothing wrong with consciousness (my real self). |
| I need to change, fix and improve my mind. | My relationship with my mind is what's important. |
| Problems happen that need to be resolved. | Problems are things that I've judged negatively. |
| Negative emotions are due to what happens. | Resistance to âwhat is' causes negative emotions. |
| I need to get rid of my negative emotions. | There is no need to push away any emotions. |
Every moment of every day offers opportunities to wake up from your conditioned mind into a more consciously aware and liberated way of relating to life. Your inner state of calm is a great barometer, which provides instantaneous feedback on what you are unconsciously judging and resisting in your life versus what you're letting be and loving unconditionally. So if you're open to be taught by life and let go of out-of-date, mind-based habitual reactions, then your life will gently guide you towards a more conscious, free and loving way to be.
