FOUR COMMITMENTS FOR ANY MEDITATION PRACTICE
One of the most common mistakes we make as Westerners is to think meditation is complicated. We want to think that there’s a secret method or secret code to crack because then we feel skillful, maybe also important.
But meditation is very simple. It’s all about trust and surrender. The path to surrender will be a little different for everyone, but that’s really all it is.
When you make it complicated, you work against yourself. The more simple you can get, the deeper you’ll go.
THE FOUR COMMITMENTS
So these are the four commitments I consider to be the foundation for any meditation practice:
1. Approach your meditation from the heart, not your mind.
If you approach yourself from a transactional mind that wants to check something off the self-care or spirituality list, yet is unwilling to let go, even for a moment, of who you think you are or of your material world concerns and beliefs, then you won’t get past the shallow surface. You’ll be unlikely to feel engaged in your meditation. But if you approach yourself with love, with a willingness to surrender, and a willingness to meet yourself just as you are, to feel your way into the heart space so that you might saturate in the love and belonging that it knows, then you will feel connected to your meditations and you will also be transformed. This means giving your body and its nervous system the time it needs to quiet down from all the mental axtivity it’s been responding to prior to your sitting.
2. Be still.
Set yourself up comfortably enough that you won’t have to adjust every few minutes. Commit to not adjusting your body every time your mind asks you to. Sometimes your mind will make up a reason you need to adjust, just to distract you, because the truth is, it’s a little afraid of the vastness you’re opening to in meditation. But if you don’t respond to its instructions to adjust, it will eventually give up. So commit to stillness. Not rigidity. But stillness. As the body finds this stillness, the mind will eventually follow.
3. Allow everything about the experience to be exactly the way it is.
When I say that, I don’t mean it as something for your mind to do, as some kind of active allowing. It’s difficult to explain but I mean it more as a state of openness and awareness. Just allowance and awareness of things moving the way they do and drawing no conclusions about it. You simply listen like you listen to the rain. Or observe the way you observe a river, without any need to change it.
4. Be easy and light about everything.
Put down the more energetic or aggressive ways of approaching meditation and spirituality, and come to it lightly. Not masterful and serious. For example, when you notice you’re in your thoughts, simply begin again, with lightness, ease, and friendliness. Find the breath again. Just start again. No matter how far you may have strayed or for how long. The breath will still be right there. And so you simply begin again, with a very light touch. Come to it lightly, open and available.
