Practice and More Practice
I started the day with my daily 10 meditation, and then moved outside to relocate some soil.
My fingers ache from working hard but I feel accomplished to have done something I set out to do. I checked “gardening” off my to-do list for the day. Journaling was the next item listed, so here I am.
One of my friends informed me that he had an interview with Ralston College. I can genuinely say that I hope he gets it, and even would go so far as to say, he has already earned the opportunity. I still haven’t heard word back at all, but I am leaning toward that being a good thing. An email was sent out a few days back advising that anyone who was not moving on to interviews would be informed by June 17th. Since my application in the portal still shows an active status of “2 — Admissions Committee 1st Review”, I am assuming that means its only a matter of time before they schedule an interview.
I spent the past two days in a daze, fueled by legal weed. Yesterday, I finally had a breakthrough moment of accepting that it is not the correct mindset to move me towards my goals. When I lose myself in a cloud of THC, I can no longer manifest the things I want. In fact, it leads me to spending a lot of time resting, which isn’t always a bad thing, but it is when I am trying to be productive (obviously). I can grant myself that it was my Summer Solstice celebration, but the truth is: I love hanging out at the ashram that is my camper. My favorite time is alone time spent in deep contemplation, meditation, or investigation. Having other people in my life disrupts that just like thoughts disrupt our meditation.
“Ah, but no Young Grasshopper,” says the guru in my head, “this is the practice”. I know this to be true when it comes to emptying my mind- that state is not the practice of meditation. The practice is actually being able to observe and come back away from those thoughts that arise when I attempt to sit in stillness. I notice feeling tones that are associated with each time I realize my mind has been wandering. Sometimes they appear as shame, other times frustration, but after so many sessions, I’ve learned to be gentle with myself. I turn my attention on these feelings and allow them to be, until they are gone.
In the Introductory Course, Sam makes a point to mention the phenomenon of sound. We can’t control whether or not we will hear a sound; sounds appear and then they are gone. We cannot make a sound linger any longer than it does. Of course, we can continue to think about sounds that were made and we can certainly be so lost in thought that we don’t notice certain sounds, but the idea is sounds are like thoughts in this way. They come into and out of existence and are detected through our brains.
In the case of sound, there are tiny bones and structures inside our ear that allow us to hear. Sound happens at the site of the eardrum and not from where ever it originated. That same principle applied to thoughts is empowering, in an oddly disempowering way. It is to say, “You have no control, except when you decide to sit and observe”. The thoughts will continue to pour in and it is up to you to decide where to focus your attention. Will we decide to focus on every thought that comes through in this manic or scattered way? Or will we, instead, allow ourselves to be the space within which those thoughts occur, and nothing more?
Restless senses, o Arjuna, forcibly carry away the mind of even a wise person striving for perfection.
One should fix one’s mind on God with loving contemplation after bringing the senses under control. one’s intellect becomes steady when one’s senses are under complete control.
One develops attachment to sense objects by thinking about sense objects. Desire for sense objects comes from attachment to sense objects, and anger comes from unfulfilled desires.
Delusion or wild idea arises from anger. The mind is bewildered by delusion. Reasoning is destroyed when the mind is bewildered. One falls down from the right path when reasoning is destroyed.
-Bhagavad Gita
Originally written in Collective Journaling at The Stoa
