Stop Trying to be calm: The hidden trick in meditation
One of the biggest tricks going in the world of meditation is when someone tells you to “simply keep your focus on your breathing” or “Now, just empty your mind”.
There is nothing simple about it! What this trick shows us, is that when we try to be still and quiet, we get to notice just how busy our mind really is and how trying to control it only tends to make things worse.
Unfortunately, without a wise teacher, many people falsely arrive at the conclusion that they have done something wrong, or that because they didn't feel calm, then meditation doesn't work for them.
And yet
All human minds are like a beehive of thoughts whizzing around and we don't get to control all the bees.
When we notice how busy and distracted we are, nothing has gone wrong at all, in fact, congratulations, you are human.
So If all minds are always busy and we all constantly have distracting thoughts popping up even when we don’t want them to, then what do we do?
Well we have a few choices:
We can become fully involved with our thoughts, live in the world of our thinking and believe they are all true: daydreaming, ruminating, planning, reasoning etc
We can exert conscious control and effort over our minds and try to reason with them or try to minimise them or fight them away: “I shouldn’t think like that” “Be calm” “Be rational” "Be kind" "Be still"
We can see our thoughts as events of the mind, maybe say “There’s an anxious thought”, then treat ourselves kindly and return our attention to where we would like it to be, fully knowing another distracting thought will pop up sooner or later.
This last choice includes compassion, awareness and acceptance and “being on our own side”. When we are able to let go of living in the world of our thinking, or becoming the controller of our thoughts, we can learn to become the compassionate watcher of what it is to be alive. When we remember to do this (and we can remember more often with practice) it doesn’t mean non stop-joy, but it does provide a sense of being a friend to our ‘self’ and with this comes a certain sense of peace and calm.
