I mentioned my meditation streak on Twitter a few weeks ago, and Claire Suellentrop replied with this great question:
What tangible benefit(s) in wellbeing have you noticed from meditation? I'm only 7 days into building a habit around this, and am seeing little hints of its effects, but curious what that's looked like for you.
— Claire Suellentrop (@ClaireSuellen) October 14, 2020
Shoutout to @JordanSkole for recommending the Waking Up app! 🙏
I gave a basic answer:
It's made me better able to notice & observe my feelings & thoughts instead of getting caught up in them. (Which in turn has helped with some of the other habits, e.g. I'd now recognise a "can't be bothered for the gym" thought as just a thought and can choose to dismiss it)
— Shai Schechter (@shaisc) October 14, 2020
But I wanted to dig into the question in more detail, because I don’t think I’ve fully answered it for myself, my mind keeps going back to it.
And where I keep coming back to—is this feeling of “ease”. This kind of lightness in the world. Not all the time, but more often.
A feeling… of the world being a playground. Of not needing to take things as seriously. Just a kind of acceptance of what I can control and what I can’t. And of letting go of things I can’t control—which is most things.
And of aliveness. Of everything feeling a little bit lighter. And just the kind of a feeling of… everything being okay.
Even if my “life situation”, if you like—for a variety of personal reasons and also, of course, global reasons at the moment—I think everyone is on a similar page with the idea that—well, there’s a lot that you could say is—wrong, at the moment, in your life situation.
But just a kind of a feeling that on a deeper level—that can’t hurt the essence of you, you know? That on a deeper level, I’m okay.
(I think if you would have asked me six months ago or a year ago—in fact you probably wouldn’t have had to ask me—I probably would have said that ideas like that were kind of twatty. But is that just because I wasn’t ready to hear them…)
I think that’s the other thing I’ve got a lot more awareness of now, is those feelings of—I can do what I can do, and—just back to that playground idea, that—
I can play in this world. I can operate in this world. I can do what I think is best and right, and that’s—that’s kind of all I have control over.
And anything beyond that which is traditionally… ideas, thoughts, fears, about “is this the right thing to do”, “is this the best thing to be doing”, “should I be doing something else”, “is my life turning out the way it should be”—all of these, you know, “should”s and “ought”s, and those kind of things… “what if I’m making a mistake”, “what if I screw up”, “what will people think of me”, “what will I think of me”, all of those things—are kind of just—they don’t have any relevance.
None of those things can actually hurt me, or impact me, unless I let them.
And I think it’s an idea that, it doesn’t matter how many times someone tells you those things, you know, you get told “failure is just something you learn from and you move on”, “it’s a good thing”, and so on, people can tell you those things as much as they like. Until you’re able to actually—there’s a big difference between that and actually experiencing and feeling that for yourself.
And I think cultivating knowing those things is the result of meditation. And while I think I might have been skeptical about that in the past, I think, apart from anything else—
It’s something you feel on a deeper level if you can only quiet your mind a little bit. Which is what meditation can help you to do.
You know, all those fears, all those—that feeling of separateness, between you and the world, it’s all mind created, and I think meditation helps you to see what’s real versus what’s mind created—what’s coming from your conditioned mind.
And as you practice quietening those things a little bit, as you quiet them, I think you then feel for yourself the things that were always there, which is that okayness, that lightness, that sense of ease, that idea of a playground (or the ‘video game’ idea that I’ve been talking about with Christian Genco recently, which I hope to write about or record about soon).
Now, not that it’s necessary to, but I am interested in the—the neuroscience side as well, of what’s going on with meditation. And I think everything that I learn about that seems to back up what I’m saying and again, I’ll write more about that (the ‘Default Mode Network’ in neuroscience, and various other things).
But I think meditation helps you to just gain control over your mind and your thoughts, see them for what they are, and with that the tangible benefits are—just these amazing things that actually they’re not—they’re things that were there all along, but they were obscured. And that’s a really awesome feeling. And apart from anything else, one of the interesting things that happens as you start to feel those underlying feelings and awarenesses more, I get a kind of a—these very nostalgic—I get suddenly transported back to being—to times when I was young—and I think those were times before the mind had taken over, if you like.
To talk about that idea of kind of—caring what other people think, other people’s judgments, I think it’s a similar thing. There’s a kind of a—do you feel, maybe, self-conscious about something when there are people watching?
If you feel self-conscious about something when there are other people around, do you feel self-conscious about that same thing when there are just animals around? What about when there are just trees around?
And if you don’t: fundamentally, what’s the difference? Why would you get self-conscious when there’s a person there and not when there’s a tree there?
It’s because of your quite understandable belief that that person might judge you. Now, that idea of someone judging you, what does that actually mean? Linguistically you’re the object of that phrase, that someone judges _you_… but in reality you’re not actually involved in that whatsoever. It’s somebody making a judgment in their own mind. Somebody’s own mind forming a judgment that happens to be about you… you are not impacted in that. If somebody wants to make that judgment that’s very much on them.
And again, that’s an idea that’s easy to say—someone can tell you not to take those judgments seriously, but it’s not enough for someone to tell you. It’s something—it’s a realisation—that I think you can only reach once you’re able to quiet your own judgments and unhelpful thought patterns. About other people. About the world. And again, I think that comes from—I think meditation is what gives you that distance. That quietening of your mind, or that distance between you and the mind, to be able to do that. And in doing that you end up just feeling… closer to everything. Feeling this kind of deep ease and satisfaction, closer to people, closer to nature, closer to all these things that again to someone else or to me in the past might have sounded kind of twatty, but that’s because I hadn’t experienced it. I wasn’t letting myself feel it or, you know, letting myself reach that place, and realise those things. That closeness. Because once you—I think it’s your mind that maintains the idea that you’re totally separate from other people, and other things, which can be quite a scary and lonely place, and it’s—I think that’s where a great deal of people’s dissatisfaction, discontent, fears, prejudices, all these things that actually don’t hold any benefit.
But I think that’s where they all originate from is from this idea that it’s—you are separate, and therefore there’s this opportunity for it to be ‘you against ____’, against whatever—the things that you label, and judge, and fear that other people are gonna label and judge about you, and all the rest of it.
And I think as the mind quiets, again, as a result of meditation—(perhaps, maybe other things, you know, there are other things that could also be contributing to it, but like I say the more I look at the science the more I think meditation has got to be playing a part in all of this)—the more that sense of—that feeling of—separation goes away, the more you realise how fruitless all the competition—there isn’t—you don’t need to be—there isn’t so much to be afraid of.
Everything’s just kind of awesome and calm and beautiful.
When you can feel that there isn’t that separation, you realise that maybe you’re not so different from other people, from other things, there’s just a kind of a—there’s this underlying peace, or beauty.
And I think if you—if you feel skeptical hearing those ideas, or you find yourself not wanting to accept those things, it’s a very good question to start looking at—_why_ do I have a belief that a calm peaceful beauty isn’t—that those feelings and those realisations—aren’t what I want?
Is that your mind, your ego, trying to keep you in existing patterns—negative patterns—that aren’t necessarily helping you, there’s just a certain comfort to them—to the ego, you know. Is that just the mind trying to keep itself in charge. Those mind-created thoughts that “oh that’s a stupid idea”, “why would I want that”, “that’s not possible”, “he’s talking crap”, all those things, again, those are mind-created, conditioned-mind-created, and where they come from?
And deep down, do you really want those there?
If you don’t, I think meditation is the first step to—to really practice that and maybe come to realise it deep down.
