![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
active mind
Aug. 14th, 2018 08:01 amAs the mind gets progressively more still over the long-term meditation practice, it's common to go through periods in which it seems that the mind has suddenly kicked into overdrive. It's very common to have a taste of serene stillness and calm, with a settled mind, fully present, and then spend the next several months with constant, loud chatter in the mind during meditation sessions and be unable to let go of thought and find your way back to the stillness.
This often means something has come up. As you develop the skills to quiet the surface noise of the mind, deeper things get unearthed. Things that operate in the background that can't be seen when the mind is chattery start to show themselves, and then the mind kicks into high-gear with the chatter trying to obscure those things.
So there's a couple levels of clinging happening. One is the clinging to the surface-level chatter. And even if at one time you were able to silence that by letting go of it, you may not be able to now. Which brings you to the paradox of how to be successful at meditation: Don't be concerned with the idea of being successful. Just do it. Be okay with it if it doesn't go the way you want it to. Do not let that be a source of frustration or discouragement. Don't let your ideas of what a successful meditation session look like get in the way of your meditation (which can be doubly difficult when you've had a taste of collected concentration and stillness).
The other is the deeper level of clinging that is causing those discursive thought wheels to spin so much. There could be something else that you're clinging to, besides the thoughts themselves. So you need to let go of that, if that's the case, which means looking at what's going on and trying to find where that clinging is happening. You need to find it before you can let go of it.
By "you" I of course don't mean you, the reader, but me...
This often means something has come up. As you develop the skills to quiet the surface noise of the mind, deeper things get unearthed. Things that operate in the background that can't be seen when the mind is chattery start to show themselves, and then the mind kicks into high-gear with the chatter trying to obscure those things.
So there's a couple levels of clinging happening. One is the clinging to the surface-level chatter. And even if at one time you were able to silence that by letting go of it, you may not be able to now. Which brings you to the paradox of how to be successful at meditation: Don't be concerned with the idea of being successful. Just do it. Be okay with it if it doesn't go the way you want it to. Do not let that be a source of frustration or discouragement. Don't let your ideas of what a successful meditation session look like get in the way of your meditation (which can be doubly difficult when you've had a taste of collected concentration and stillness).
The other is the deeper level of clinging that is causing those discursive thought wheels to spin so much. There could be something else that you're clinging to, besides the thoughts themselves. So you need to let go of that, if that's the case, which means looking at what's going on and trying to find where that clinging is happening. You need to find it before you can let go of it.
By "you" I of course don't mean you, the reader, but me...