Dog walked early, an hour. Espresso. Out to the garden. The app gong starts my meditation, ten-minute interval bells for pacing, a gong to end. Thirty minutes.
Sit, eyes closed, breathe...
The new-age trope - be in nature, quiet the mind, sit in lotus, light the essential oils, be Zen. Dabbled for years. No issue with any of it, just the movie that plays when my mind rests on that one word meditation.
Up until today, it was more like the Duolingo treadmill. Keep that streak going. Push through the pain of it. Doing duo, but still can’t put a sentence together with a native speaker.
Yeah, that. The should. Energy falling, not rising.
The first ten minutes. Always tricky, the “quiet the mind” instruction fighting the turbulent spiralling reality in my head. A heavy “I should do this”. The mind resisting, restless, wanting to do other stuff.
“Where is this resistance coming from?”
That halted the conditioned thinking. A felt shift. A pervading sense of urgency and rising energy. Surrender. Give up quietening for the rest of the session. Eckhart Tolle’s “Be the watcher” echoing softly in the background. The resistance gone, lightness flooding in.
The mechanically programmed move: The game of optimisation. The streak-chaser, the one who “can’t quiet the mind”. So I called it. Quietly decided I’m no good at this - and let it fall. I’d received the wrong instruction. The gold was hidden under my nose, and the map I’d held didn’t lead there.
Quiet facts bubbled up from within. Choiceless awareness. Ancient wisdom cutting through illusion. Searing the conditioned beliefs.
Just watching. Just listening.
I’d been resisting because the teaching is quiet the mind. But, the lived reality, was a mind with urgent communications it wanted me to hear:
Meditation as the space that allows the communication link; not the silencing of it.
I’d intended to publish the Reports from the Repairshop origin story first. But the urgency of this insight filled my consciousness. No sequenced planning mania. Honouring the signal.
One question.
Who gave us the maps we’ve pinned to our walls?
With thanks: this post began as a note under Stoic Wisdoms’ “Critical Thinking Is Harder Than You Think”. “Be the watcher” is Eckhart Tolle’s; “Choiceless awareness”, Krishnamurti’s.