Step back and dis identify

Been listening to Eckhart Tolle speaking about the inner body the last few days on my MP3 player. This is a great teaching which I've not heard from anyone else, not to say it's not been taught by anyone else. Focusing on the feeling of the body from the inside as both a meditation and as a means to bring oneself back from the incessant stream of thought during daily life. And what a martial practice, to be constantly aware of one's own internal energies from moment to moment in the maelstrom of bodies flying around the dojo.

Eckhart's other main teaching is to dis identify from one's thoughts and emotions, and what he calls the pain body. The pain body is basically accumulated emotional baggage that has been repressed over the years and rears it's head as an overwhelming emotional burst. When you can step back, so to speak, and witness your thoughts and emotions for what they are, realize, there are my thoughts, and there I feel my emotions, and hear I am, then you are automatically free from them. You are free to choose to change your behaviour, to feel good instead of bad, to take the higher path.

It is my mission to maintain that awareness constantly. When I feel I am being over-run by negative emotion or thought pattern, no matter what apparently reasonable excuse I might have, I will not identify and react but will step back, breath, feel my body from within and make an original decision.

Refuge

Although I have been meditating on and off for some years now, it's only the last 3 weeks or so that I have finally succeeded in habitualising at least ten minutes twice daily.

The results so far?  I am exceedingly aware of the constant chatter my mind produces every single moment of every single day.  How was I not aware before of this mental noise?  I was aware when I was thinking, but it seems that even when I'm not consciously thinking there's a stream of babble that is mostly useless regurgitated information spilling through my head.

It's doing my head in.

I am told by reliable, worldly and spiritual sources that the next step is to accept without judgement, as I try my best to do with the world outside my head, every thought that comes.  And yet one of the thoughts that comes quite often now is 'Oh shut up you're so annoying!' which, of course, just adds to the mental clamour.  In fact, my head is doing my own head in.  Making sense?  Of course not, it's mind!

So where do I take refuge from this noise?  There's no way out!  So I must enter deeply instead.  Morihei Ueshiba is quoted as saying : 

'You cannot see or touch the Divine with your gross senses.  The Divine is within you, not somewhere else.'

I do find from time to time in my meditation that towards the end of my session, I am left calm and the noise has quietened significantly.  I remember one night last week which felt truly blissful and I did not want to leave my position.

I feel my practice must be extended now to start just when I start to reach that state.  Ten minutes to quieten the mind's chatter merely by watching it and then ten minutes mediation, sitting in the calm state.

Ten Minutes twice daily

So I've been kind of lazy in that I've not been meditating regularly of late. Just using it as a tool at crisis points when it all became too much and I felt like exploding!

But last night and this morning I sat for ten minutes in my room and breathed.  And got carried away by a thought or ten, and remembered what I was doing, and came back to my breathing again.

Ten minutes and I was out of that room more aware of my self and surroundings, more aware of my breath, more aware of those around me and how I interact with them.  And then there's something more than just that.  A peace around and between everything that draws me closer to the world.

So my new years resolution, and I will follow this one through - ten minutes sitting each morning and evening, come hell or high water.

Worry

The more I worry, the less life flows, the more it all knots up until it comes to a head in thoroughly crap day or an explosive argument with Catherine, my beloved partner.

On a moment to moment basis I am aware (when I am alert enough, conscious enough) of my mind as it churns out possible things to be concerned about.  Future events that may happen (Ooh, I hope not!) or may not happen (Ooh what if that doesn't come through?) that my mind would mull over and, indeed, does mull over fairly constantly.

As I remain sober almost a year on, meditate and study all these amazing and simple teachings available to us,  I am becoming aware of how much useless activity is being generated by my mind.   And it's not just useless, but it generates worried and fearful emotions that cost me energy.  This in turn costs me in body tension and posture.

What I find myself doing in response to this realization is waiting for this process to stop.  And so, of course, it never does.  I am once again looking to the future when all will be well, when in reality all is well now.  As Eckhart Tolle is fond of urging us to ask, "What problems have I got now, in this moment?".

The real challenge is to accept in full the totality of one's self and where you are at now.

Interesting side effect of meditation or mind watching, is as one becomes aware of how much mental chatter is going on, it feels as if it is increasing.  I don't believe that this is actually the case though.  It's like, you see trees every day but only when you look at them closely do you notice how many leaves are on them.  And the closer you look the more leaves you see.  Sooner or later, if you're going to see the tree as it is, you have got to step back and stop following every branch.