When I first tried meditation, after taking an evening's seminar, I thought I would be good at it. At the time, I rarely tried anything if I thought I might fail.
The first morning, after coffee, I leaned my back against the living room couch and stretched my legs out in front of me. After years of running and not enough stretching, my legs wouldn’t tolerate a cross-legged pose. With an alarm clock at my side, I closed my eyes and expected to plunge into the beautiful silence of my inner self.
All I heard was the cranky and chattering voice of me. For a millisecond I focused on my heart, then thoughts yanked me back to the important: the itch in my knee, what I would eat for breakfast, why I should be good at this, the movie last night….
After hearing at least twenty minutes of this chatter, I started to get up, hoping that it was all right to meditate longer than the suggested fifteen minutes the first time. But I checked the clock just in case. Two minutes!! What!! Only two minutes had gone by!!
I returned to trying to focus. When I finished, I was sure that I was wasting my time with this nonsense. But some part of me, definitely not the top-of-the-iceberg portion, wanted to meditate the next day. And the next. And the next. In a month, I became more accustomed to the rhythm of my mind and began experiencing spaces between the thoughts. These spaces helped me to gradually begin dipping into the deeper part of me.
I still cannot sit cross-legged for very long, but I have been meditating daily for nearly 30 years. Some day the spaces between my thoughts are razor thin and other days, they seem as deep as the ocean.
How true it is: meditation is a practice.
(modified from Make Every Day a Friday! The Joy of Connecting Who You Are with What You Do by Marina Spence, copyright 2008)
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