Meditating Through Madness
Jacques de Villiers – writing quest: Article 33/365
I’ve been meditating for more than 30 years now. It has probably been the single best practice that has kept me from totally unmooring from this reality.
Meditation seems to imitate life or life imitates it.
For me meditation is about taking my mind and my emotions into a place of stillness. Or as Dr. Joe Dispenza puts it, becoming no thing, no body, no place and no time.
It’s all about breathing in the meditation I practice. It’s pretty much all about breathing in life too, isn’t it?
During meditation, if my mind drifts, I bring my attention back by focusing on my breath through my nose.
Meditation reveals the extent of my scatteredness and how easily I become distracted. A bird chirping takes me out of no thing. An aeroplane overhead gets my attention. An itch needs to be scratched. A thought needs to be followed. A fly needs to be shooed away.
I’ve trained myself to allow myself to acknowledge those distractions. I don’t use the force of willpower to banish them from my consciousness. I let them go by returning to the breath.
I always plan to have the perfect meditation, and it never happens. Sometimes out of the hour, I get 45 minutes of ‘real’ meditation. Sometimes 30 minutes. And, sometimes when things really go awry, five minutes. But even five minutes is valuable. For me five minutes of meditation is worth five hours in the gym. And, if I had to choose, I’d always choose the five minutes of meditation over the five hours of gym. Not because gym is hard, but because meditation is more likely to take me to where I really need to be on this journey.
Here’s the thing: those five minutes are valuable to me and to the entire consciousness of the planet. Those five minutes get me through the madness.
If you think you’re too small to make a difference, you’ve never been to bed with a mosquito.
Anita Roddick, author of Business Unusual
Always back to the breath
Isn’t life akin to meditation? We have plans (purpose) to impact the planet (or, at least our corner of it) and then things happen to distract us and take us off our path. When you feel distracted, gently remind yourself of your purpose (breath) and fulfil the promise that is in you.
Nothing we do will ever be perfect (in my experience, at least), but what we do matters.
If you don’t believe me, take Jesus for example. His ministry was a mere three years, and look at the astounding impact he made.
What do you think you can do in three years? One year? Five minutes?
Go do that. Go now!