Meditation #75: The burning house

Today I was having a hard time dealing with some mental baggage I was carrying around. Despite trying to go about my day, listen to a podcast, clean the apartment, I was feeling bummed out. Feeling heavy. Feeling unmotivated. Distracted.

And of course I was feeling distracted: I was distracting myself. The phrase came to my mind, “I just have to get into my head.” That’s the opposite of what we’re typically led to believe is important, right? When you’re feeling upset or obsessing over something, your friends will say, “You just need to, like, get outta your head, man!” (I assume your friends are all hippies, like mine.)

But this is akin to discovering a problem in your house, like a broken pipe or even a fire, and leaving. “Oh no, the stove caught fire. That’s stressful. I gotta just get out of my house so I can let it go.” A few minutes later you look back in through the window. “Whoops, now the kitchen table is also on fire. Better take another walk around the block.” Pretty soon the whole house is up in flames, and what are you going to do about it now?

Instead of trying to get out of our heads to deal with issues, we should avoid distractions and let ourselves exist within our own minds for a while. Even if you don’t consciously do anything about the fire–er, the issue–your mind does the work for you as long as you hang around in there and let it. And you might even find that before too long, you feel comfortable sitting down and actively thinking about the issue. Maybe resolving it, maybe not. But observing it at the very least. And sometimes that’s enough.

Meditation #74: Wanting

Wanting.

Recently when I was meditating I decided to focus on the feeling of wanting–which I’ve been feeling quite acutely lately–and it was a revelation. In my mind’s eye, trying to see what was underneath the wanting was kind of like looking at the earth from space and seeing the atmosphere just cluttered with satellites.

In fact, it was more like taking apart a Russian nesting doll. Each layer was me wanting something, and when you finally take away all those layers and get to what’s underneath, it’s a tiny thing compared to what it seemed like. Or maybe it’s like an onion. Or an ogre.

I don’t know.

What I do know is life seems huge and challenging sometimes, but if you peel back the layers and get down to what is really there at the core, it’s very simple and peaceful. It’s just existence. No more, no less.

Breathing, in and out, and consciousness.