Rules for a Long-Term Relationship with meditation:
Someone once asked the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, how he keeps his practice alive: “ He smiled: “So you want to know my secret? I do whatever works and change it when it no longer works.”
Although I have a regular meditation practice, there are times when my world feels just all a little bit too upside-down to sit down. Recent travels being one of those times: Constantly on the move in 40 degree heat, with teenage boys, sharing small spaces.
When I have a meditation wobble, I always keep in the back of my mind that I'm taking an Asian, male monastic tradition or practice and adapt this to suit a Western (in my case female) world.
Asian monastics adopt a monastic lifestyle, renouncing worldly pursuits in order to concentrate on spiritual contemplation and studies. However, for most of us, our world includes 21st Century 'human life' problems like traffic congestion to work, or 'momsy stuff' like groceries, school pick-ups, taking pets to the vet, fixing a vacuum cleaner, dealing with girlfriend/boyfriend crisis, or applying emergency first aid when someone falls out a tree. Sometimes it includes international travel, moving house or changing jobs. You get the picture. So we may find that a meditation schedule that works perfectly for ages, may suddenly not work: our wonderful, incredible, unpredictable life.
So I think Rule number 1. could be: Do whatever works—until it doesn’t work any more.
What keeps me going and trying is that I really like meditation. Because when I'm sitting I get a good sense of my calm centre - and I like it because I know that every action I take has a ripple effect on everyone around me, and my actions are worthier / more beneficial to others when I meditate regularly.
To keep our meditation practice alive, we need to keep a flexible mind. We can set ourselves rigid sitting schedules, but when we can’t adhere to those, we tend to drop meditation altogether. Much better then to have a soft, fluid mind. It prevents our meditation structure - and us, our mind - from becoming rigid.
This is not to say that a structure is not important, and sitting every day should be the goal. I often say in a beginners class that it's better to sit every day, even if only for 3mins, than to sit for a long period of time only once or twice a week. I compare it to brushing teeth. Every one does this, every day, right? The average person doesn't say 'they can't brush their teeth today because they don't have time.' And brushing teeth generally doesn't take much longer than 3 minutes. So if you find 3 minutes to brush your teeth, do you think you can find 3 minutes to sit? Probably. And you'll most likely find, once you are sitting, that the 3 minutes you thought you could barely scrape together is ridiculously short, and you find yourself wanting to sit for much longer. The most important thing is to get 'your butt on the cushion'. The rest automatically follows.
To do this regularly, perhaps we need to be a little bit creative and
learn to meditate in different places. I have found a very good trick: people usually leave you alone when your eyes are closed because they think you are sleeping. If you sit with your eyes closed, you can meditate almost anywhere: on a sun lounger next to the pool, in a train, on a plane or in the car as you wait for someone.
If you still feel it's difficult to get a regular practice together, it's good to remember that meditation is something to practice for a lifetime. It's something we do for the rest of our life. If we feel that meditation is something that we have a long term relationship with, then even if there are periods when we can’t get to the cushion, it doesn’t mean we have failed or that we have to give up.
In those times that your schedule has gone to pot and you can't sit in formal meditation, you can still live as a meditator, carry meditation inside yourself, still see and feel as a meditator, but physically practice differently.
Like walking meditation: Natalie Goldberg says about a time in her life when she couldn't sit: “...This is when I made walking my meditation. If you saw me in those years, you saw a woman knowing the present pleasures of a mind weighted down into the soles of her feet."
Mindfulness meditation doesn't change the life which is happening around us. Being a meditator doesn't mean we don't have crazy-busy days or that life becomes less unpredictable. Being a meditator means we practice to increase the capacity we all carry within ourselves to be more accepting of life just as it is, in it's crazy-beautiful, wonderfully unpredictable way. It teaches us to be more accommodating, softer in our approach, more compassionate.
Have a wonder-filled day!
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