adding on to the reflections on meditation that Nikki started, i agree -- Though it isn’t its primary raison d’être, meditation is a perfect training ground for developing patience. Take being aware of the breath -- an invaluable tool in meditation. But even if we try meditating with the breath for five minutes , we quickly see how unstable our attention actually is. As a new meditator, it can feel hopeless -- mere seconds go by and the mind is already lost in some memory or day dream, gone for many minutes at a time. We might find that the mind actually wanders much faster in meditation than it does in our more everyday experiences (like say, reading a book). And that’s because everything is magnified in meditation. It’s designed to be that way, so that awareness can sharpen and refinement can happen at a subtler level of mind. Over years of practicing, I came to experience the principle at play here: when things realign at the core, this transformation ripples upward from the depths to the surface, and outward into the rest of our lives. So each time we realize that the mind is no longer focused, that realization presents us with an immediate opportunity to practice a new way of being. And that opportunity can only come alive -- with a heart of patience.
all in all, awesome passage, wonderful recording, and great comments ... melissa, regarding the male/female energy, turns out the author is also female :-)
On Jun 29, 2010 viral wrote :
adding on to the reflections on meditation that Nikki started, i agree -- Though it isn’t its primary raison d’être, meditation is a perfect training ground for developing patience. Take being aware of the breath -- an invaluable tool in meditation. But even if we try meditating with the breath for five minutes , we quickly see how unstable our attention actually is. As a new meditator, it can feel hopeless -- mere seconds go by and the mind is already lost in some memory or day dream, gone for many minutes at a time. We might find that the mind actually wanders much faster in meditation than it does in our more everyday experiences (like say, reading a book). And that’s because everything is magnified in meditation. It’s designed to be that way, so that awareness can sharpen and refinement can happen at a subtler level of mind. Over years of practicing, I came to experience the principle at play here: when things realign at the core, this transformation ripples upward from the depths to the surface, and outward into the rest of our lives. So each time we realize that the mind is no longer focused, that realization presents us with an immediate opportunity to practice a new way of being. And that opportunity can only come alive -- with a heart of patience.
Wrote up a much longer piece recently on this.
all in all, awesome passage, wonderful recording, and great comments ... melissa, regarding the male/female energy, turns out the author is also female :-)