When your mind wanders bring it back to safe anchoring with calmness of breath. Like a boat gone loose from its moorings guide it gently back to calm emptiness by tying it fast to the dock of yourself and in your mind’s eye sit beside it. As you watch the water’s rippling surface feel the gentle breeze upon your skin, the sun upon your head, and know that you are safe. Breathe in calmness, breathe out disturbance, sadness and pain. Breathe in purity and goodness, breathe out madness and evil. Breathe in love, breathe out hate. Use your mind in this manner for calmness, peace, and love. It’s within your power, the power of your own breath!
When a frustrated student asked how to contend with his mind, whose meanderings had undermined his attempt at meditation for three hours straight, the teacher replied, sternly, “What your mind does is not your business!” *
Put attention where it matters most… – Photo by Chuck Ketchel
The guidance was simple: let the mind do what it wants; place your attention on your breathing. You are not responsible for your thoughts; they have a mind of their own. However, you are responsible for where you place your attention. Hence, every time you notice your attention drawn to a thought, gently return your attention to your breath.
The fact is, we are of two minds: the mind that generates the thoughts and the mind that decides where to place its attention. Don Juan Matus explained it like this: “Everyone of us human beings has two minds. One is totally ours, and is like a faint voice that always brings us order, directness, purpose. The other mind is a foreign installation. It brings us conflict, self assertion, doubts, hopelessness.” **
Our meditation student was being coached to develop his true mind’s ability to place its attention on the breath, to withdraw its attention from the thoughts generated by the foreign installation, the mind that is truly not “his business.”
The objective of meditation, as well as the shamanic practices of the Shamans of Ancient Mexico, is to free the true mind from the dominance of the thought-story dramas produced by the foreign installation that, like the true reality portrayed in the movie The Matrix, steals our vital energy for its own sustenance.
However, the battle to free the true mind must be carried out with utter gentleness lest it be caught in the clutches of a foreign installation trap that absolutely thrives on inner conflict. The foreign installation mind catches us by feeling offended, inadequate, inappropriate, unworthy, unloved and unlovable, etc., all the myriad of ways the self has failed or been failed by others. There is no end to the stories generated by the foreign installation to trap our attention and feed off the energy of our ensuing inner conflict, as we sit captivated and live through the intense thought-story drama generated for our entertainment and attachment.
The foreign installation mind cannot be fought directly. The wisdom of the guidance—that this mind is not your business—is the freedom to not worry about it or pay any attention to the fact that it exists. It’s not about trying to control or change it either. It’s simply about taking attention away from it and placing it where we choose.
In the shaman’s world, it is this behavior—the refusal to engage in the dramas of self-importance generated by the foreign installation—that ultimately frees the self from the dominance of the foreign installation.
Simply put, when we don’t attach to the dramas of self-importance, our energy is withdrawn from the predator’s grasp, that is, the foreign installation that feasts upon our frantic energetic reaction to its thought-story dramas.
This is the true meaning of mindful detachment, as we learn to place our attention on being fully present, freed of attachment to the dramas that generate inner conflict, the product of the foreign installation mind. “Your” mind is not your business, but where you place your attention IS your business.
Fully present, in the moment… – Photo by Chuck Ketchel
Fully repossess your own mind. Do it calmly, with no judgment as to the number of times your attention is drawn to the wares of the foreign installation. That mind will continue to carry out its business, while you simply begin to more fully realize that you don’t have to shop there any more. Eventually, that merchant will move on, as you refuse to fund it with your vital energy.
Have no attachment to how long or short it takes; focus on placing your attention calmly where you want it. It’s as simple as that!
Freeing the mind, Chuck
* Excerpt from:Journey of Insight Meditation by Eric Lerner, p. 80
** Excerpt from:The Active Side of Infinity by Carlos Castaneda, p. 7
In meditation it is common for thoughts to impose, for ideas to form, for stories to spin. The antidote is to bring attention back to the breath, to a mantra, a chant, any predetermined anchor will do the trick… until thoughts reappear. Then it’s back to the breath, to the mantra, to the chant or the anchor.
Life, I have found, is much like the process of meditation. We can so easily be overwhelmed by life, by forgetting why we are here, our purpose often impossible to locate and often harder to actualize, as our daily intentions go flying out the window as soon as something enticing comes along. The desires and demands that come during the unfolding of a day are like the thoughts that impose during meditation. In fact the thoughts that come during meditation are all about life—the figuring and planning, the conniving, reminding, and determining of what we want and how to get it—as the two intermingle, quite naturally.
Over time, as we learn to sit quietly, in meditation or otherwise, we enjoy a peacefulness that may only exist because we are removed, for a few moments, from life, from its plans, needs and wants. We discover that we are simple beings, just sitting still, part of it all. The more we achieve such moments of sitting still the more we experience ourselves as simple energy, needing nothing. No matter how we came into this world, what our experiences have been, and who we think we are, we can all achieve the same simple pleasure of quietude in sitting still.
It is in such quiet moments that deeper realizations come to us. It is in such quiet moments, when we are no more than a breath of air, that we might discover our deepest and truest needs. They might not be what we think. The quiet truth, learned in this manner, might shake us as violently as the truth learned in a harsh or abrupt and painful manner. The quiet truth is often the catalyst to real change, just as tragedy or trauma is.
And then there are times when nothing seems to change us. Nothing that we do, nothing that happens to us has any effect. We might be truly shaken or we might enter a state of bliss, but such moments of opportunity pass us by. Perhaps we are just not ready. Perhaps we are afraid. Perhaps this is not the lifetime that such things will be accomplished. Perhaps we really do want to come back and do it again. Perhaps that is our deepest truth after all.
Perhaps we haven’t achieved quiet sitting very often. Perhaps we haven’t given ourselves the opportunity to hear our deepest truth. Perhaps we feel we’ve been shorted, that life just isn’t very exciting and we just don’t have any hope that it will change. But in taking a different look at who we really are, we offer ourselves a truth that is hard to ignore. For, in truth, the being we are in the world, as we go about our lives, is only one part of us, a different being from our sitting quiet self.
It’s not hard to determine that the worldly self experiences life one way, but our sitting still self experiences it another way. It’s also not hard to determine that both of these selves exist simultaneously. We might notice how we present one self to the world and another only to ourselves; though both exist in our physical body they are two different beings.
It is our quiet self that asks us to sit still and it is our worldly self that interrupts with those thoughts, ideas, and stories. It’s our quiet self that reminds us to breath, to say our mantra, our chant, to anchor ourselves in some way when we meditate. Or we might be sitting outside, quietly listening to the sounds of nature when thoughts interfere. It is our quiet self that shuts them down, intent upon having a moment of peace. Once we realize that we are these two selves all the time, we realize they each have an important role to play. They are the knowing selves, our closest guides through life.
Sitting quietly… – Photo by Chuck Ketchel
As we shift our awareness away from finding one or the other as problematic, and connect to both of them, we are more aware of how they work, and how we can work with them to stay focused, sometimes quiet and sometimes active, for it is only in a balance of the two that we can really live in this world. And then the challenge becomes giving them equal time, listening to both of them, and acting appropriately.
And that is the true work of this lifetime, to know who we really are—all parts of ourselves, fully—to work with what we came into this world with, striving always to make this life be the one where we solve and resolve all that has haunted and challenged us, perhaps for many lives. Our ultimate goal is to fully transform and actualize our fullest potential, in this world and the next. Now that is something to sit quietly and meditate on!
Bring all parts of the self together… find wholeness in unity… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
What is it that you really seek? Today, Jeanne suggests that it’s really pretty simple. We are all seeking the same thing: Our other self, our spiritual self. How do we find that self? Listen to today’s channeled message to hear more.
Meditation offers balance and detachment… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
We live in a time of information overload. We are saturated from without by a constant flood of communication, from the latest news of everyone’s experiences to world events and an environment rapidly and unpredictably changing. Inwardly, we are flooded with images, thoughts, feelings and sensations, all vying for our attention that they might share their own stories.
The challenge now is how to stay grounded and manage this high intensity flow of data while simultaneously figuring out what is real, meaningful, and deserving of our attention.
There is a growing consensus, from many fields, that the ancient meditation practices of the East provide a technique that enables us to manage this overwhelming flood of data that we perceive or generate in such a way that we are granted the freedom to decide where we will place our attention. The simple ability to notice a thought or news item but be able to then choose to bring our attention back to the present moment, to our breath without interruption or a further development of the thought, goes a long way toward calming our central nervous system and providing the grounding to navigate daily life.
Carl Jung long ago identified two psychological functions, intuition and sensation, that are relevant to deepening our ability to navigate the flood of stimulation we encounter from within and without each day. Simply put, intuition is a psychological function, a sixth sense, that perceives what might be behind a door we are about to open, for instance, or “sees” some event in the future. Sensation operates through the five physical senses; it perceives what’s “actually” here and now.
These two functions are extreme opposites; one focuses on concrete known reality, the other on a future reality, unknowable in concrete terms. Often our minds are inundated with thoughts, feelings or images that if left to run freely would generate a story we might then contend is real. Suddenly we imagine a look on someone’s face or a call not returned as a definite snub. We feel rejected. We become frightened, anxious, and worried and before we know it we are living out that drama as if it were real.
Meditation might aid us here to lift us from the intensity of this inner drama and ground us in the here and now through focus on our body and one of its physiological functions, breathing. Here meditation couples with the sensation function to ground the ego and enable it to take back its energy from the drama. Afterwards, once centered, the ego is in a position to determine whether the germ seed of the drama was an actual intuition—that is, an actual perception of a future reality for instance—or merely the spinning of an illusion by a thought or some other trickster character in the personality.
Sitting with sensation our minds eventually enter the beauty and calmness of pure intuition… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
Intuitions generally occur spontaneously, presenting a definite picture, feeling, or knowing of something unseen. The experience might be compared to a flash of lightening. It’s powerful. Inner dramas, by contrast, though they might build in emotional intensity as the drama deepens in the mind, are more like soap operas spinning endless tales than sudden and powerful shocks of knowing. A grounded ego, detached from the drama, is in a good position to determine if it’s dealing with drama or intuition and can decide more clearly what to give attention to and what to discard.
Of course, even when dealing with a legitimate intuition there is still the possibility that a perceived future does not unfold along the lines intuited. Once again we do well to exercise the tool of mediation that helps us to stay grounded in the present moment, suspending judgment of what might happen as we watch life unfold as it will.
In developing a dedicated meditation practice we are provided with the grounding in sensation that enables us to delve into and explore the unseen without being captivated by phantom dramas that consume our vital energy and distract us from real life. Meditation provides the bridge to unite the seemingly irreconcilable opposites of sensation and intuition, allowing us to deepen our meaningful presence in life, in all its dimensions.
Sitting in calm sensation,
Chuck
Once again, I share a YouTube video of a very simple and easy Korean meditation method: Son Meditation.
