Why Bother Meditating?
Meditation is challenging.
Anyone that tells you it’s easy is probably trying to sell you something. It takes time, energy, and determination. Often in life we feel like we have a shortage of these things. It’s tempting to avoid meditation. I could meditate, but I’d rather watch Netflix or sit and drink beer. These days it’s so easy to fill our time with many things that are either productive or pleasurable. We always have things to do. Is it worth our time to stop and do nothing for a little while?
Why should we spend our time meditating?
We do this because life and hard and it helps. Every one of us is a mess. We may think we are and some people aren’t, but we’re wrong. Everyone is a mess. We’re confused, we struggle to be happy, and we’re distracted. A lot of the time we’re just sleepwalking through life, missing everything. We have difficulty being fully present.
There is a way we can learn how to live our lives more fully. That what this is about. We’re trying to learn how to be more present and aware, to see more clearly, and to be more genuine. There is depth and clarity in our lives that we’re missing.
Sometimes we get stuck in an “if only” perspective. If only this or that was different, then I could be happy. That can easily steal all our joy. We have a pervasive mental habit of always wanting. We spend a lot of time labeling the world around us, putting things into categories to try to make sense of the world. Good, bad, boring, fun, etc. We put things in categories then decide how to react. And sometimes we don’t even know we’re making those judgments ourselves. When we call something bad we want to push it away. When we call something good, we want to try to hold on. We always have less power than we’d like to push and pull these things. No matter how hard we try to hold onto good, sometimes we can’t. No matter how hard we try to push away bad, sometimes we can’t. And when there’s nothing good or bad, we’re often bored. We have put ourselves in chains of grasping our likes and pushing our dislikes. We’ve put ourselves in chains but the truth is we have the key.
And we can improve that by seeing clearly.
Another thing we struggle with is change. Things are always changing when we want them to stay the same. Change is the nature of the universe. When we learn to pay attention to our minds we see that there’s plenty of change there too. Our thoughts come and go and lead to others thoughts, sometimes so fast that we don’t even know how we got from one thought to another. People come and go in our lives. Good things come and go. Bad things come and go too. It’s all about change. And, of course, ultimately it becomes increasingly clear to us that we’re getting older. Our bodies are, slowly but surely, going too. Change is inevitable and hard to accept.
What it all comes down to is this. We are carried around by a subtle discontent that I call suffering. We can learn how to manage that by learning how our minds work and training them. We can learn how to recognize our desires and not be controlled by them. We can want or fear something without becoming unreasonable and/or obsessed.
Through meditation we learn to see how our minds work, then we can learn to see ourselves more clearly. That’s where the magic happens. When we see ourselves clearly we can really learn how to manage our suffering. Mental cultivation through consistent meditation practice is a powerful method transforming our relationships to ourselves and to the world. Meditation purifies our minds. It cuts through the baggage and the bullshit and shows us what’s really happening. This brings us clarity and helps us develop wisdom, mindfulness, and compassion. Meditation softens us and opens us up so we stop making enemies out of everything all the time. Meditation can make us deeply aware of the world and our place in it. Meditation also helps us sharpen our concentration so we can pay attention, really pay attention, and experience the world in a more full way.
Why meditate?
Because I want to live my best life. I want to see the world in a more clear and full way than I ever have before. We may not be able to add years to our lives, but we can add life to our years.
Why not try?
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