Someone sent 2,096 of my friends and colleagues an email Friday trying to sell electronics devices. If the message made it past your spam filter, sorry for the intrusion.
I discovered this state of affairs tonight--didn't pay much attention to my email over the weekend.
But I stayed unusually cool...all on account of an inspiring manuscript I'm reading. A young writer to whom I provided only the slightest bit of help sent me her completed novel asking if I'd consider writing a blurb for her brand-new agent to send out with the manuscript.
First, it was exciting to see what she'd done. Then I spent most of the day reading it: and the book so inspired me. The story put me in the mood to relish the minor difficulties of life as part of the big game.
I'm not always inclined to take that attitude. The last time I played a driveway game of pickup basketball, some decades ago, I got irritated because people kept waving their hands in my face.
Today's delightful reading reminded me that the waving hands and other obstructions are part of what makes the game.
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7 comments:
Excellent choice, Peggy, and one that will become a need rather than a resolution. For high-energy people like me (and you?) the very act of being still is transformative.
Peggy,
Meditation is something that we all could use a bit more of in our days!
I am sitting in "the resistance" right now, and it does not feel very good at all. There has to be a way to break it down, yet sometimes, the resistance is so incredibly strong.
In what way does the meditating directly help you to "defuse the resistance"? Do you give yourself specific directions while meditating or does the meditating, in itself, have a way of breaking down resistance? I would love to hear more about how this works for you. Lord knows I can use all of the help that I can get when it comes to dealing with resistance, these days!
Big hugs,
Debbie
Wael, are you the same guy who used to tutor me in French?
Debbie, I'm sorry you're having a wrestle right now.
How meditation helps me: for one thing, it's like counting to ten. It gives me a moment to reconsider the direction I'm heading in. Not that I actually think about things. But it breaks the momentum of heading in the wrong direction.
And it functions like sleep, in a restorative way.
And I'm still experimenting with this. But I think it makes me a little less vulnerable to being thrown completely off-balance.
I also see it in religious terms. It's a sort of prayer.
It restates my allegiance to something larger than the looming issue of the moment. In that, it's like keeping kosher or praying at five set times a day. It reminds me of my ties and support outside of the moment's complications.
It helps with physical relaxation. And good ideas tend to pop up after meditations more often than they do before.
But to put all this into perspective: I've already meditated today and still I'm having a "fat day." So it's no panacea. Still I think it has helped from saying "Oh, what the hell, since I'm fat anyway, why not fall into a total cookie binge."
I also think the meditation helps me at such times to keep a grain of a memory that this mood has nothing to do with size, just me being down on myself or the conditions of life. It's easier to think that a problem can be fixed by my losing three pounds, than it is to think that there are things--aging, illness, death, etc.--that I don't control.
I hope your wrestles get easier, Debbie. And soon. At any rate, you have company...
Mamie, I think I'm likely in your energy column. And I often find myself moving, slowly, like an underwater plant while I'm meditating. Sometimes I stop that, and sometimes I let it continue. I'm not sure that it affects anything.
Thoughts on this phenom are welcome. Any other meditators wave like seaweed?
For a lot of people, meditation is giving the universe/Karma/God/your higher self/whatever the open space in which to come to you on it's/his/her/whatever's own terms, not our own. These terms often come as a sort of motionless explosion, a state of all-being so far beyond our norm that it's almost non-being (ie: Nirvana), or anything in between.
In this sort of meditation, silencing our own white noise (and not so white noise) is the imperative. It is an action in that it is a non-action, or maybe that's the other way around. Teachers of this sort of meditation often will tell us that they can only describe various ways to get there, but only we can find the path there.
If movement is your white noise of the moment (and if you are normally the go-go-go kind of person you sound, it's high on the percentage likely list), then yes, it would usually be considered advisable to quit it. If the movement is the product of your meditation (somewhat doubtful, but who knows, everybody's path is their own path) then what is it telling you?
On my path (and yours may vary vastly), meditation isn't the way to prevent fat days, bad hair days, or those tetchy, irritated, PMS'y days such as the one I had today. Meditation is the way to provide a clear-cut picture of what matters and what doesn't. I'm waiting for the day that I figure out that I get such a good picture of this that I can serenely and calmly get on with losing weight, having good hair, not being irritated for no real reason than hormones, etc., but haven't gotten there yet. :)
Good perspective on the seaweed motion, K.B. I tend to move a lot, so probably better if I could stay still. But sometimes that floating thing does feel right, so I don't fight it.
I took a course once in a movement system called Continuum that was about slow fluid movement. There's something mysteriously healthy about doing some of that at some point, whether it's in meditation or not.
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