Meditation Blog

  What am I looking for in meditation?  Some kind of wisdom, or truth? Is it like finding a needle in a Haystack? Or does one just need to find the Haystack? The last straw will do it; the very last one, the one that shatters the ridgepole. If I keep on at it, I might get there in the end. Everything is accumulative, learning does not take place without repetition, reinforcement, echolocation. Practice will get you everywhere. By gently placing the attention, over and over, the mind gets used to whatever you are doing with it, and starts repeating the pattern by itself. Anything you do every day will have a result. Just have a look during the day at what you are paying attention to, what you are doing with your mind, what you are thinking of over and over, and try to see what it is creating... or what has already been created by it. See how difficult it is to change! Replace what is not helpful with instead something that is helpful. I am fairly sure that is the only way to progress? 

    This morning, when I should have been meditating, I was thinking about how to explain this concept, and it's like my mind when I first sit down to meditate is a complete mess, everything all jumbled up. This is I think a universal experience for anyone starting to meditate: as soon as you start to realise what's going on in your mind, it seems like an impossible task, the clutt er  in there is unbearable, you realise you're never going to be able to sort it all out. But that's an illusion. It's only because you've just begun to look at it, you've just noticed it, that it seems that way. If you hadn't bothered to look, it would have carried on being cluttered but you probably wouldn't have thought twice about it. When you go into the shed to find a screw or a nut, and you see something like the picture above (it's a picture I just took, of the very useful box of random screws and nuts and miscellaneous bits and pieces in our cupboard,) you don