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“You are not the voice of the mind, you are the one who hears it.”
- Michael Singer, from The Untethered Soul
My wife collects quotes that she copies onto scraps of paper while reading or listening to podcasts. I recently came across the above quote on a square of notepaper on our kitchen counter. I hadn’t heard of Singer before, so I looked him up. He’s led an interesting life as both a mindfulness writer and software entrepeneur who sold his company for a billion dollars. His PhD dissertation in economics was rejected because he’d written more about spirituality than economics, but he published it as a book, The Search for Truth, which is still in print fifty years later.
This Buddhist idea resonates with me. I’d love to relegate my mind to the rank of body part, no more important than my heart or lower back or little toe. I aspire to that kind of non-thinking. When you get a twinge in the back or a crick in the neck, you can stretch and apply massage for relief. Meditation relieves the mind.
Sometimes meditation feels like a duel between my consciousness—my true self—and my racing mind. Guided meditation often focuses on the breath. After I sit down to meditate, I take a few deep breaths to help set my intention. But then I shift to the mind. It twinges away, out of control, and once I establish awareness of its activity, the quality of my meditation deepens.
I’ve developed some approaches to gaining awareness of thinking during meditation. The goal isn’t to empty the mind of thoughts, but rather, to become aware of thoughts, to watch them. A side benefit of awareness is a calming of the mind, a lessening of thoughts. One such approach derived from an experience I had alongside a river.
My wife’s cousin is a yoga and qigong instructor. I wrote about him in my New Year gemlog. Anyway, we were hiking with him once, and we pulled off at a riverside for some qigong. I didn’t know much (and still don’t) about qigong, but he guided us through a meditation intended to connect us with the energy of the water.
Imagine standing by a lazy river on a summer afternoon, eyes closed, while the water flows from left to right. Extend your arms and hands at waist level, palms down, slowly shifting them back and forth, left to right like the water, over and over again, absorbing the energy of gentle flow.
I recreate this water meditation in my mind. My memory of that day is itself a thought, but it invokes feelings in me that run deeper. At a certain point, the visual disappears, the thinking subsides, and I’m left with the sensation of movement. Thoughts flow through the mind like water. They float by, neither good nor bad. I’m the one watching and listening to them.
Society has long treated illness of the mind without compassion, almost as a moral failing. It seems the world is evolving its understanding of mental health throughout the pandemic. Humanity has been under tremendous stress. Some people have a bad back, others a heart condition, and still others suffer pain in the mind. The mind asserts itself as an extroverted leader, babbling at us around the clock, but we are not our minds.
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