So maybe you sat down earlier today, possibly for your first ever meditation. You were full of good intentions, ready to get going on this amazing journey. You sat, and listened, and things were going well.
…and then you remembered that email that you sent earlier, or that news article you read, or maybe a conversation with your spouse or kids. Or a dog barked and you started being cross with your neighbour because goddamit, it’s early for that hairy beast to be out…
…and before you knew it, you were gone.
Then: 1 or 5 or, who knows, 20 minutes later – you remember what you’re supposed to be doing, and you nudge yourself, and you’re back in the room, meditating again, woo look at me, I’m good at this! And you’re there for a couple of breaths and then something tickles in your mind again, and it’s the booking for that holiday you’re due to take, and did you post that bill payment or is it still on the side in the hallway, and was that creaking noise a burglar, or your wife, or….?
And so it goes, on and on.
The mind, it turns out, is not at all good at being here, at being now, at not casting backwards to the past or forwards to the things that you’re planning. This is your monkey mind, always jittering about, always somewhere other than now.
Frustrating, isn’t it?
Well yes. And it’s also incredibly hard to change. But here’s the good news: firstly, it gets better. Secondly, our mission as meditators is to learn how to deal with it when it doesn’t get better. We’ll come back to this time and time again both here on our blog and in our courses. All you have is your mind, and all you have is your thoughts, responses and attitudes to the things that happen to you, including those moments when you lose yourself in thought.
The learning here is not to do what we often do, and that’s to beat ourselves up, tell ourselves we’re rubbish at meditation and will never calm our monkey mind. Instead, when you notice your focus has slipped, just begin again. The great (check her out, she’s wonderful) Sharon Salzburg says this:
We get to begin again. Every single time. That has been one of the consistent messages I have gotten in every experience I have had with meditation. Wow. What a concept. If you mess up, just start over.
Sharon Salzburg, Begin Again
She goes further in some of her other practices, and describes that moment at which you realise your mind has wandered as actually being the practice. This was immensely useful to me as a meditator – it turned a “damn it, I’m failing” moment into a “this moment when I notice is me winning at meditation” – a game-changer in helping me think differently about how to deal with the wandering mind.
The takeaway here is that we all suffer the monkey mind. We’re all monkeys, after all. When you notice the moment, just begin again, re-focus, don’t beat yourself up, and just sit. Always – just sit. You’ll find as you practice that your mind settles a bit (some of the time…) and does it for longer periods of time – but possibly more important, you’ll get better at being kind to yourself when your mind inevitably wanders.
Here’s a really rather lovely description that resonated for me:
“Uncalled for, unwanted, the thoughts flew across my mental space, back and forth, hither and thither, like birds in the evening sky, chasing and losing and finding each other, racing, wheeling, dispersing, gathering, gliding a while then flapping in hard flight, always moving, through each other and across each other, at different altitudes, different speeds, as the light fails and the breeze comes up and the rain spatters on rustling leaves.
Then one by one, at last, they begin to settle, they drop from view. With a last flutter, a thought settles on its perch and is quiet. On a rooftop perhaps, or in your wrist, in your throat. Another joins the first, and another. Thoughts fluffing their feathers before falling still. Perhaps one last squawk – Rushdie was right! I should have hurled a chair! – then silence.
Until, huddled together on their wire, between your ears, they lose definition, merge into each other, become a single pool of feathery shadow, deep shadow in the darkness, one layer beneath another, beneath others, as eyes close behind closed eyelids, watched by still deeper eyes, and the mind at last discovers itself transparent; the mind is finally still and clear as clear water, and from top to toe the body brims with transparent wordless mind the way a glass held between steady hands in the porticoed chiaroscuro of a sizzling afternoon in Seville might brim with transparent water around the dark secret of the black fig.”
Tim Parks, Teach us to sit still
Good luck out there.
