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Messy Meditation
Take into account all of what you are.
If you start a meditation practice, it shouldn’t be with the goal to be perfect. Life isn’t perfect. Humans aren’t perfect. This is all messy. Meditation can be merely a clean-up of the mess, but it also can be a mess itself sometimes.
It’s different every time, it’s fluid, and it cannot be defined. Meditation is an exploration of your true existence and mind, and these things are far from perfect. Your mind may be all over the place, and that’s exactly the way it’s supposed to be.
Don’t be afraid of the mess inside your own mind. Forgive yourself for the mess.
Meditation should be comfortable. It should feel like something you look forward to. It should bring you joy. When you’re trying to meet expectations of it going a certain way, you’ll frequently feel like you’ve failed because the mind wants to be free. It doesn’t want to be put into a box. Sometimes it wants to be scattered, sometimes it wants to be heavy, and sometimes it wants to focus on things that don’t make sense. If it doesn’t want to calm down and clear itself of distractions, don’t be hard on yourself about it.
Know the Mess
Be messy. But do it with the intention to understand the mess. Allow your existence to be whatever it needs to be, and get to know it for what it is.
We all have childhood trauma. We even carry karma from past lives that causes our inner worlds to be challenging. We have emotions all over the place — even those of us who have meditated regularly for years still get caught up in the mess. Anger, sadness, and fear all come up for us all because we are all human. The key is to find the beauty in the mess rather than trying to reject it.
Love the Mess
We’re all learning. We’re all going toward bliss and enlightenment. The path isn’t always clear. There are inner barriers to total transcendence. There are things that cause us suffering in life, and they stand between us and happiness. It’s the acceptance of this that is important, not the elimination of it. Become friends with your mess.
When we are starting to meditate for the first…
