z9: Meditation: My nemesis

As I've mentioned before, I didn't come to the zen center to meditate (z2). I didn't like meditation, didn't see the point in it, and am a total brainiac- telling me not to think is like asking me to give up my security blanket. So, you might not actually want to read the next few posts, 'cause I still suck at meditation. But, before I go there, I do want to share one insight. It didn't help my meditation practice but it gave me a reason to keep trying.

I was sitting at the zen center, attempting to meditate. I had recently learned the technique of acknowledging your thoughts instead of trying to block them. Each time a thought came up, I would simply say to myself: "Oh, that's a thought!" Here's how it went:

Is my mudra right? Oh, that's a thought!

I wonder if you can sprain your ankle by sitting on it. Oh, that's a thought!

Hey, I wonder if they used asbestos to make the walls of the gaitan...DING! (that's the bell, ending the meditation session).

Drat, another session in which I did NOT meditate. I fluffed my cushion, bowed to and away from it and walked to the coatroom to get my things. I quietly walked out the door, unlocked my bike, and started walking up the hill back to my apartment.

I started thinking about the day ahead of me. We had a field trip and I wondered which parents were going to be chaperones. I wondered whether they'd get mad at me for stopping at every intersection or whether they'd complain about the fact that I had started crossing when there were only 20 seconds left. I pictured them whispering about me, after school, as their children ran and played on the yard.

Oh, that's a thought!

“What?” I thought.

“Oh. My. Gosh. That's a thought. We haven't even been on the field trip. I don't even know who's going on the field trip and even if I did, I don't know what those parents are thinking about me! I am making this stuff up and if I want to, I can keep holding on to those thoughts and spend my morning worrying. Or, I can realize that they're just thoughts and move on with my day.”

“I GET IT!” I wanted to shout. You stare at a wall to practice. You do this thing over and over so that your brain does it without trying. The only reason that I realized that my fears about the parents were just a thought was because I had just spent the last half hour paying attention to my thoughts. It's a habit- I'm developing a habit. And I'm developing it so that when I am out there in that big world and dealing with parents and kids it will happen much easier. I'll be able to “return to the moment” to not “read into things but to see them for what they are” to “have the presence of mind to respond to the situation instead of react.”

Now, the practitioners at the zen center are probably going to get mad at me for saying that I meditate for something, you're only just supposed to meditate to meditate (and I actually get that now because if I meditate in order to reach a goal, two things will happen: I will never reach my goal ('cause, really, you never do- you totally know this is true) and I will be disappointed that I didn't reach my goal.) But I think that they would agree with me that practicing meditation on a regular basis is, at the very least, helpful in developing the mindset that allows you to see the world for what it is. So, when I fail at meditation, I think “Well, it's just part of the process and maybe this one wasn't all that great but I'm still developing the muscles and training the brain and it's helping.”