Meditations for taming the crazy elephant mind |
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Why do we need meditation classes? There is nothing so exhausting as having to live with an uncontrolled mind. Recollect how you feel when you're watching television and just getting into a movie, sinking deeper and deeper into the atmosphere and momentum, when suddenly you're distracted by an advertisement for the latest car, or bank, or dot.com. It completely shatters the concentration. Remember how you feel after a night of TV and ads - it's draining. Our mind is like that distracted evening in front of the television all the time. No sooner do we establish one positive thought or feeling, than suddenly it is shattered by other thoughts of jobs to do, people to meet (or avoid!), or emotions of nostalgia or expectation. A day spent in the continuous stream of our own thoughts and emotions can be just as tiring as the evening's TV viewing. Instead of letting these experiences get the better of us, we can use meditation to learn to direct our thoughts and feelings so that the positive thoughts and feelings remain with us for longer periods of time, making us enjoy more and more of our precious life. We spend most of our time trying to re-arrange our external world of relationships, possessions, careers in the hope that if we only organize them in the right order we'll find the long-lasting happiness that we seek. But can we really say that we when we get everything that we want we feel content? There's always a problem somewhere. Even when we succeed in fulfilling our desires, soon afterwards our desires change. We're searching again, now for a better car, a bigger house, a more 'perfect' partner. Like kd lang sang in her hit single 'constant craving'. Does it have to be like this? It is time to seek happiness from a different source. Or at least in the beginning to seek happiness as much within our mind as without it. In our body-dominated world, we forget the potential power of our mind to deliver all the satisfaction we seek. When I teach meditation to beginners, I always suggest that people allocate as much daily time for meditation for cleaning their mind, as they do bathroom time for cleaning their body. We would never go to an important business meeting looking disheveled and unkempt, but how often do we approach that same meeting with our minds in states of dishevelment and agitation? Through meditating regularly we really understand that happiness is a state of mind, and that therefore the real source of happiness must lie within the mind, not in external conditions. As Buddhist meditation master Geshe Kelsang Gyatso writes in his book, Eight Steps to Happiness:
Or put another way: 'Wherever you go, there you are'. |
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