"Thou art a soul in bliss; but I am bound
Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears
Do scald like molten lead"
King Lear (Act IV, scene vi)
I was asked why I meditate everyday. There is a simple answer and a complicated one. The simple answer is it allows me to awaken.
The deeper answer is this... every day as we live and breath, grime builds up around our essence and being. It is the natural outcome of every day living. This grime blocks the pours of our spiritual, thinking, emotion and physical being.
At the end of every day our skin and our actions have had their day in the sun and beg to be washed away.
Sleep washes away the redundancy of the day that has is no more. Each morning we open our eyes to a brand new day, it is (or at least should be) a new brand experience of what it means to be me in this life.
If we drag the redundancy of the previous day or days (or even months and years), if we remain locked and pre-occupied with reliving conversations and actions of the past, there is no room left to experience today. Living in the past fills up the present, it is the most severe living, breathing death sentence we can pass freely upon ourselves.
This is the natural redundancy or by-product of living. It must be rinsed out and eliminated from our memories, bodies, houses and towns/villages. Processing this natural waste is vital to our health and well being. If we fail to eliminate it, we will feel its burden, we may get ill, but left unattended it will eventually choke us to a living death. We may become so consumed by the waste that we become the waste.
Cleaning a room, organizing our desk or workspace, taking a bath or shower cleanses our body, holding an honest conversation, all of this can be hard work, but it leaves us free, energized and breathing whole. The same is true for listening to a great song, watching a marvelous movie, preparing and/or enjoying a freshly cooked meal, going on vacation, even going on a shopping expedition, all these basic actions renew our focus on the present. These acts can be habitual or meditative. If they are on auto-pilot they are a living death, if they are concious, if they bring us back to today, they are a form of meditation.
How do we cleanse our spirit? We can't wash it with soap and water, we can't hoover it, put it in tidy little stacks and draws? The only way to reset the default on our soul is to withdraw, to draw a breath and then another and then another. Breathing is what it's all about. This stops, and everthing else ceases to matter. Returning to our breath reminds us what is really important, begins to put all other noise and clutter into perspective.
Meditation is a very deliberately way of not acting, allowing the dust of yesterday to settle. The dead skin of old actions and events needs to settle so we can see through it and move past it. What was once vital, is now rubbish. Once we are able to mark and discard the mental and emotional baggage, the noise or redundancy of our past, we are free to discover a new voice, in the new - present moment. This is a freedom that cannot be fought for or bought forth. It is there inside us all the time.
Our history is the rubbish of moments that have 'past' - we need to manage rubbish properly, extract it so that it does not contaminate the 'present'. We have to respect rubbish but not take it so seriously that we bathe our present or presence in it.
We can pull the resident energy from yesterday's rubbish if we apply a ego-free contemplation, refuse to justify or pass judgement. Making excuses for what we said or did yesterday is soiling our clean hands in a deathly smell.
Reflecting on the past and learning from our successes and mistakes is an act in the present, this also sets us free. It is not to be confused with blindly re-living old conversations and experiences. One is working the truth out of the past, the other is being consumed by it.
Learning from the past is hard work, but it is not the same as yearning for or becoming the past.
Our chief task is to create history, not to toil in it.
We wash out the noise of yesterday with the water of silence and contemplation. Prayer or meditation unlocks the hold that the past has on us. But it is more than faith, even the simple acts of cleaning tables, washing dishes, repairing cars are all a form of prayer. These act returns us to sanctity and allows sanity to prevail.
We create our sanctuary (home) by cleaning out the excess. Like a poet removing excess words or a composer extracting excess notes, we create space for ourselves by removing the redundancy (rubbish) around us, by tidying up, cleaning or renovating the space in which we live.
We cleanse our spirit through love. True friendship cleanses our emotional and spiritual grime,
For many years my mother has taught me the importance of "rehm-das" --- this is a deep level of empathy, a deep, authentic concern for the well being of others. This is not be confused with sympathy or charity. It is akin to the Golden Rule - of doing onto others as you will have them do unto you, except it is not about taking an action, it is a state of being that informs all our deeds.
I was asked why I meditate and my reply is this: "I meditate for the same reason I shower every morning and eat fresh fruit, it helps me enjoy a brand new day, experience a brand new way, allows me to be brand new - me". It all gets down to one simple word: FREEDOM.
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