What if meditation didn't have to be so hard? Continued..

Continuing on the consideration of meditation, not as a practice that should confer an immediate quiet, perfect thing...I would like to explore a different way of approaching it.

In order to do this, I need to share an experience I had where I went crazy.

I had wanted to do a meditation retreat for some time, had put it off due to scheduling and general busyness until I finally signed on for a 10 day quiet experience. I did not bring my car as I wanted no option to take flight; doing that set me up for success and for one of the most significant challenges in my life.

The ideal of the meditation, as you can guess, was the theme that we are exploring, to find one's self in the quiet without thought, emotion or random songs arising in one's mind. During the process, I did everything the teacher said, committed to the practice and deeper and deeper in, not only did I NOT find the quiet that they were intimating was possible, but in fact, I found the opposite: sheer frustration and deep shame.

I was obviously wrong, I was doing it wrong, I would be judged, chastised and all of the childhood experiences of trauma and bullying vied violently for my attention.

Now, for most, they would simply 'sit with it', striving to not-think, work with the rage that would arise and the echoes of voices telling them that there was something defective with them, and believe me...I tried!

Until...

About half way through, I cracked.

This was truly, the 'dark night of the soul' and I worried for my health both during this time, and frankly as I would be leaving for the 'real world' in some days. But, part of me knew that there might be something here, inside the delirium, something of use both emotionally and spiritually.

I retreated to a small clearing to find a large rock that became my best friend during this travail and laying on it had an epiphany: it doesn't have to be like this.

What I realized is that meditation, like so many things, is subjective and is yet a practice, thus we presume based on what is given us that 'this is the way.'

For me, I am a bit of a contrarian, and seldom do what I am told, so the idea that maybe I could morph the practice, even while being safe in the retreat center was at once daunting to me and exciting.

I decided with the next session to sit and rather than go into shame that I was thinking/not-thinking/thinking about not-thinking that I would instead welcome the thoughts, all of them, every single twisted variant of whatever the hell popped up.

As I began to welcome the thoughts, I went into an altered state where I could see as though on a kind of carousel with me in the middle and the various thoughts rotating in real time.

These then, turned into psychic post-it notes, if you will.

That is, I would have the thought "how long have I been meditating?" and that would then get placed up on the carousel, and then the next thought would arise and that would get placed up and so on.

What happened was nothing short of amazing.

The thoughts were no longer the enemy, they were no longer the neurosis that I was trying, and failing to extricate in the fantasy of perfect-pure-mind-thing, rather they were as friends, each a quality (and quantity) of energy, of Qi in my experience.

As I continued to set the thoughts as post-it notes, I found, ironically that they did not tend to repeat, and I will say that as I've continued to practice this, and offer it to some patients, that this is generally the case. It is not a 'cure' to the vagaries of life, and meditation will often show us how discombobulated we actually are when we are not distracting ourselves, yet, I will say that for me, the practice became interesting, became not something that I dreaded doing even though I knew it was good for me, but rather something that I looked forward to. I found something that I relished and had a sense of creativity with a sense of becoming present inside of stillness.