Pilgrimage of the Mind

Every meditation for me is a pilgrimage into the mind, into the place where I can feel and experience both the gravity and the weightlessness of my thoughts. My meditation is where I explore a protean terrain of personal preferences and emotions and where I can excavate the roots of my reactions. 

Meditation challenges our notions of doing in favor of the practice of being…

It feels undeniably like a little journey every time, and every time I learn a little something new. Most of the time, I learn something as mundane as reacquainting myself with my boredom because the passing of time – while sitting still with your eyes closed and breathing – can feel achingly slow. Meditation challenges our notions of doing in favor of the practice of being, and this can be difficult to grasp for many. Other times, my meditation sessions are deeper and more intense: I feel as if I have unearthed a hibernating animal, a shapeshifting unnamed emotion that had been lingering in hidden places. And when this happens, this is where breath and visual mind imagery take on a special role: I start to imagine my breathing as occupying and expanding these hidden darkened unknown places. The breathing takes on the work of exploring these new spaces, to bring my presence and attention to these formerly unbeknownst crevices. And instead of anxiety which I instinctively feel in the presence of uncertainty, I start to nurture ease. 

 I start imagine my breathing as occupying and expanding these hidden darkened unknown places. 

Yes, ease. Ease is a word that is often misused, like the word love, in our culture. We live in a modern technologicaly-drenched world of convenience: there is an “ease” in which we can access so much information and knowledge yet we become ignorant of a wisdom that is rooted in our bodies and in our minds. This is the ease with which I speak of and which I cultivate imperfectly in my meditation. It is an ease of being, of feeling, of knowing, of embodying truly – of embodying love, compassion, trust and health. This is the whole of meditation: that we practice being well, that we hold our minds as sentient loci worthy of exploration and fascination. This is where the wisdom lies. There is no perfection to achieve, there is only the experience of being and embodying.