I’ve found a new friend during my meditation practise, his name is “Percy”, or “Persistence” to give him his full title. It’s a tempting vision, the idea of the meditator sat there, at effortless inner peace. It’s also wrong. When meditating it’s often a terrible struggle, as any meditator will tell you, you’re assailed by the “Monkey Mind” bringing mental noise and distractions. This is quite normal and can be quite discouraging.
The only real solution is to persist with your meditation in a firm, non-judgemental and gentle manner. The constant distractions and re-finding of your focus; the days that you really don’t want to sit but do so anyway; the days that you do miss your sitting but return to your practise the next day, knowing the it’s the right thing to do; these times are where you really learn about meditation.
It’s not effortless success that teaches us to meditate, it’s that moment of re-finding our focus that teaches us mindfulness and doing so without comment or harsh judgement that begins to teach us compassion. For both mindfulness and compassion begin with ourselves, so it seems to me that in meditation to fail is really to sow the seeds of success. As long as we remember Percy, of course.
I’d love to hear from other people about this.
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