How to Make Your Meditation Work for You!

In my previous blog, I explained why meditation does not work for many who try it in the hope that it will reduce the stress in their lives.

Let’s say you have an arid farm and let water flow into it through an irrigation canal you have dug. You let the water flow for an hour. The canal itself absorbs all the water and nothing gets through to the planted vegetables.
If you want to harvest your crop of vegetables, you must let the water flow and flow and flow.

It is the same with meditation.

Your mental chatter is so out of control that a regular sitting for a few minutes or a half hour barely begins to slow it down. The best you can hope for is a slowdown in the rate of increase of the momentum of your mental chatter.
So, what do you do?

What can you do?

It is really quite simple.

Stop thinking of ‘meditation’ as something that you do for a set period of time. Your entire life needs to become a meditation.

I get pushback when I advocate this. People protest that they have careers to pursue, businesses to run, families to care for and dozens of other things to do.

This is not really a problem. You merely think it is a problem.

There are many things you do everyday without ever thinking that you are ‘doing’ them.
You brush your teeth. You go to the toilet. You take a shower.

Then you go to work, and you say, “This is not the same as brushing my teeth. There are cognitive processes involved here. I need to think about marketing strategies and personnel decisions and financial strategies.”

This is just a story you are telling yourself.

In truth, you can let all of these activities go on with no sense of ‘doership.’

Do you remember the first time you fell in love? The Sun shone brighter, flowers were more fragrant, the grass was greener and even the passers by were somehow imbued with pleasing personalities.

And you got your work done while floating joyously through air touching ground every hundred yards or so.

And you thought of your beloved all the time. Every minute of each day.

That is how your life can be. That is how your life should be.

And then your entire life becomes a meditation and errant mental chatter is no longer a problem.

It is simple. It is not easy.

Let life unfold. Don’t force it to unfold.

I will return to this topic many times in coming weeks.

Peace!