Meditation Stuff

I feel great.  I think the meditation workshop on Saturday has left me with a peaceful core, at least for the moment.  It's been so long (like years and years) since I've been peaceful inside that I'm shaking my head at how wonderful it feels.  I read over the seven essential attitudes that I learned about at the beginning of the class and can see how much better I am at these than I was a month ago.

I love these seven essential attitudes so much, I want to share them:

Nonjudging: Mindfullness is compassionate, openhearted, choiceless awareness.  It is cultivated by taking the position of an unbiased, attentive witness to your own experience as it happens in the present moment.  To do this requires that you begin to relate the contents of experience without judgement, as the present moment unfolds. When you practice mindfullness, it is important to recognize the judging quality of mind and identify judgemental thinking as it arises.

Patience: Pateince is the ability to bear difficulty with calmness and self-control.  It requires connection with your calm inner core and also some faith and courage.  Patience also requires a degree of kindness and compassion for yourself as you bear the upset of the situation.  Often impatience arises when the ego, the self-centered part in each of us, screams for thing to be different than they are.

Beginner's Mind: To practice beginner's mind means to open to the experience in each moment as if meeting it for the first time.  Though you may have experienced a thousand sunsets, you have not experienced this particular sunset.  The same is true of a lifetime of breaths, or the hundredth time you taste your favorite dessert.  This particular breath and this particular taste have never happened before and will never happen again.

Trust: A basic part of learning to meditate is learning to trust yourself and your feelings.  You learn to trust that you can see clearly what is actually happening to you.

Nonstriving: We spend so much of our lives doing things and trying to change things.  This pressure to do and to change is felt as striving, or straining to be different, to go elsewhere, or to do something else. The practice of mindfullness involves simply paying attention, without judgement, to whatever is happening.  In this sense, meditation is a unique human activity.  Meditation is about non-doing instead of doing.  To practice meditation is to practice being, not doing.

Acceptance: Acceptance means seeing things exactly as they are rather than as you think they are or as you think they should be.  Remember, things can only change in the present moment.  You have to see things as they are and yourself as you are - truly - in this monent if you wish to change, heal or transform yourself or your life.

Letting Go:  Letting go, or non-attachment is another attitude essential to mindfullness.  Much of the time people are practicing the opposite attiude, clinging, without even knowing it.  Often what you cling to most strongly are ideas and views about yourself, others and situations.  Don't get caught up in good or bad, high or low, pleasant or unpleasant.  Just let your experience be what it is, moment by moment.  This letting be is actually a way of letting go.  By not interfering, by just letting things be, you give them a better chance to go.