Turning point? I have been

Turning point?

I have been obsessing over the war and doing a poor job of meditating. Over the past several weeks -actually a couple of months - I have felt myself slip slowly back into old habits - non-mindful habits - such as eating in front of the television or while reading. I have meditated, but instead of 35 minutes and sometimes longer, it's been 25 minutes and sometimes shorter. What's more, I've felt little advantage from my meditation because it seems to work less and less. It is not relaxing me the way it did, or giving me those deep insights into reality and now.

I've told myself I have to get back to basics, but the war keeps grabbing my attention. Finally, last night, I worked on a project I had been putting off for some time. It is a volunteer Web job and the person who asked me to do it had irritated me by nagging me about it last week. But last night I sat down and in the course of three or four hours finished a significant portion of the job.

Then I read the email that had irritated me in the first place and it irritated me again. I went off to do something else and I found myself carrying this irritation into the next project. So I picked up "The Power of Now" and read a few sentences. Which ones, I'm not sure. But it all came back to me in a rush.

I wasn't living "now." I was living back in the past. I was reliving the irritation of that email over and over again. And more importantly, I realized that this was what I was doing with the war. I would read something - or write something - that bothered me deeply. Then I would carry it with me in whatever I did. So every once in a while I would try to swear off war news. I would say I am not going to watch any news on TV for 24 hours. Nor would I read the news on the Web. It's silly, after all. I don't need hourly updates. That's obsession. But I couldn't do it. Which is final proof that of an addiction. I want to stop and I can't.

Why?

Because the war is important? Yes? But the real problem was simple. I was carrying it with me in my head and reliving it no matter what else i was doing. I had lost my ability to live in the now.

What's more, I was fighting this obsession and devising schemes to fight it and in so doing, I was giving it strength. Instead of simply recognizing my thoughts and letting them slip away as i return to the present.

I realized all this because I saw it happening with a much smaller, far less important thing - this other Web project and email that had irritated me. I immediately put that project aside. That is, I told myself it was done and dropped it from my thinking. And important part of the project was done. I'll work on the other part some other time. I wasn't going to act on the email, so it too was done. There was no reason to think of either and there was every reason to live in the now. To understand at that moment that I was tired and should go to bed and enjoy the experience of doing so without any other thoughts.

So now I hope I can do this with the war. I hope I can read the war news, write about the war news and while I do so, give it my full attention. But then I simply have to get up and walk away from it. No more replays in my head. Stop letting my chattering mind interfere with my living in the now. It's not a matter of meditation. It's a matter of doing everything with a concentration = both mental and physical - on what I am doing at the moment.

I have to remember that meditation is only practice - that the goal in a sense is always to meditate. That is, you practice by sitting still for 30 minutes or so - but the objective is to bring that control into everything else you do all day.

Let's see if I can do it. Right now I am going to proof this and post it. Then I am going to exercise. At a later point this morning I will spend an hour or so with the war. I will give it my full attention. Then I will put it down and move on to something else.

I'll let you - and me - know if I am successful or not. Posted by Greg Stone at April 3, 2003 05:13 AM