You can find stress relief using meditation and turn a life of hustle into a life of flow. We get so easily caught up in the busyness of life that we tend to push the moment trying to make it into something that isn’t really there, that hasn’t quite happened. We are always on the hustle, but we have lost our ability to experience life in the flow.
Meditation is a generic word whose practice is to quietly to deep inward focus as practiced in many traditions. The word springs from the word dhyana, which means one-pointedness of the mind. This is achieved by focusing the mind’s attention on one object or image. Meditation is a process of being calm and present in the moment, rather than struggling to change what is happening.
Our reactions to the constant pressures of life can cause chronic stress and chronic pain. These cause changes in the brain, and as such is considered a disease of the brain. The brain is chaotic and we are confused. To heal the brain, we must quiet the mind. Studies have shown that using mindfulness reduces chronic pain. The state of being experienced through the practice of mindfulness calms the mind and so allows the brain to heal.
One objection I often hear people who are stressed make about their meditation practice is that they find it boring and so dismiss it out of hand as any use to them. This is illuminating to me. It tells me that the person is coming right up to the edge of the abyss of the freedom from feeling harried by life.
We are addicted to our excitement. We are addicted to our stimulation, whether it’s the rush of adrenaline, the constant activity of our busyness, or the heaviness of depression. We are used to filling our experience with something. We have lost touch with spending any time being. Yet, when we are still, we want to fill that stillness with something, because we are so used to filling the moment with something.
Boredom is a judgment on stillness. Boring is the way in. Boredom is the doorway to our balance and to quieting the mind. It is a gift where we find the power of surrender if we can sit with it long enough. When we are able to sit with our boredom, allow it to be what it is, become an observer of it and how we are reacting to it, we discover the neutral mind. What is the value of the neutral mind? We sit without judging our experience, but merely an observer of it.
How you deal with boredom in meditation is the key to your transformation. Can you stay with the boredom and watch it? Or will you slip back into the old patterns of always wanting to keep a busy and engaged mind and stop attending to your boredom altogether? If you can sit and watch your reaction to the boredom, you will discover that your boredom falls away and you enter a whole other realm – one that you cannot access in the busy-minded thinking world.
The sameness experienced in meditation is the calm dwelling place that you have been trying to reach all along through the hustling and bustling through life. You might think that at the end of all of that frantic activity, you can rest. Yes, you can sleep. But wouldn’t you rather learn a way of moving through life flowing with the moment instead of fighting with it? The repeated mantra, the cycle of the breath or heartbeat are points of delicious monotony – the opposite of what our busy mind is used to, but just what will bring the balance to our life.
Get curious about expanding beyond your limitations. Ask yourself, “Who will I be without the busyness in my life?” Perhaps you have been pushing for so long, you do not know who you would be without it. It’s okay not to know. Get curious about your not knowing.
Meditation teaches you how to slow down. Meditation teaches you how to pass time without having to fill the moment with anything at all. It reveals that the moment is the reward. You meet it without expectation. When you are fretting about in the world, feeling pestered that there is never enough time to do all you have decided we must do, time becomes an opponent you engage as if in a battle. You discover that in the meditative space, your concept of time dissolves altogether and you are suspended in an eternal moment.
In meditation, we experience ‘the nothing’, which the mind, our ego, cannot quite wrap itself around. Meditation teaches us how to wait. We discover the secrets hidden in the in-between-places the spaces between thoughts, the spaces between breaths, the space between heartbeats. It is a place where such quiet lives, it is beyond imagining. We must discover it through experience.
Nestled in the belly of boredom is the peace you’ve been seeking for so long.
Meditation holds the reward of being fully consciously aware in the moment. Each moment becomes a discovery, a dynamic, learning ground for an ever-unfolding new reality. It teaches us to release our expectations about how things should happen. For the chronically stressed person and chronic pain sufferer, this is a powerful and effective healing tool to ease your life and bringing serenity.
For more on meditation, visit https://Elizabeth-Kipp.com/category/meditation-room
