Moving beyond the familiar
I read something a little while ago, and I really liked the perspective:
"One of the most difficult things to remember about our meditation practice is that we’ve truly never experienced this moment before."
In our meditation practice – in our life - we discover how easily we slip into repetition. Because it's easy. We notice it in the habitual way we move into our posture, where we notice the breath in our body when someone prompts us to observe the breath - under the nose, in the belly - our mind usually moves to the same place to watch the breath. Oh, how the familiar becomes the comfortable!
Even though sitting in meditation is supposed to be experiencing what is happening right now, we often want to experience a different kind of meditation, especially if it's not so comfortable. We don't really want to be in the moment, we want that easy, feel-good meditation we had last week.
In our posture, our breath, our way of doing things, we tend to gravitate towards tried and tested methods. If it feels “right” or “true”, it feels comfortable. That comfortable, familiar way doesn't need too much planning. And so – quite quickly - we sink further into our comfort zone. We know the feeling from our yoga practice when we sit cross-legged and are asked to switch our legs around, or place the other hand at the bottom instead of at the top in sitting meditation's cosmic mudra.
But of course comfort zones fail us from time to time, and then we often feel frustration, anger, boredom, or – much worse, in my opinion – we keep repeating the same thing even though it clearly doesn't work for us. Our failures are always instructive. Failure can be an opportunity for insight.
I read something this morning about Darwin. I'm not sure if it's true, but the article mentions that Darwin, whenever he was faced with something new, something that contradicted his beliefs, would quickly write it down. Because he knew that our mind is hard-wired not to accept that which contradicts. So unless he wrote it down, he knew his mind would push it out of existence.
To really sit in meditation with the right mind, to be truly in the here and now, we have to move beyond the familiar. A nice way to think of it is that every one of our meditations should be a new experience. So that the only thing we are repeating is moving into a place we have never been before.
We might think of sitting in meditation as being repetitive, being the same action of sitting again and again, in the same posture. It could be thought of as boring, or we can use it to notice things. We can use it to become aware of what has become familiar, habitual, obvious. Or we can mobilise our curiosity, move into a new, unfamiliar moment. Because every moment is a new moment. It is one of the most difficult things to remember about our practice (about everything in our day). We have truly never experienced this moment before.
Mx
