| The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight - Thom Hartmann |
| ISBN 0-340-82243-0 |
As parents, we have a massive influence over our children – and the kinds of adults they will become.
Last ski season, I was flying from Dublin to Geneva – the plane was full of holidaymakers looking forward to a few days of fun. Sitting next to me was a little guy, maybe three or four years old, with his legs crossed up under him, buried deep in his Nintendo game. Beside him, was his father, reading the Irish Times Friday Business Supplement. Every time his son asked him something, the father told him to be quiet, that he was reading important news – and every time, the father was getting more agitated.
“May we have your attention for a few moments while we explain the safety features on this aircraft…” the hostess announced. The little guy’s father said “Turn that bloody thing off!” “Why, I’m having fun” “Turn it off, they’re the rules” replied the father.
“Get your legs out from under you and sit up straight – and put your seatbelt on!” “Why, I’m comfortable”. In complete exasperation, the father said “Now look here you, young man. Who exactly do you think you are that the rules don’t apply to you? Do you think that you’re someone special? Do you not know that you need to conform? This not playing by the rules is bad enough now – but, if you continue like this, it will bet you in to even greater trouble in later life!”
I don’t make this stuff up – that’s it, word for word. I was tempted to get involved but decided that I had to sit beside these guys for two hours!
I constantly tell my clients that meditation is like your life in miniature – in other words, everything you encounter during meditation mirrors your daily life.
So, for example, during meditation, your conscious mind will distract you – with an average of 50,000 random thoughts whizzing through it, it’s bound to! If you let those random thoughts simply pass on during meditation, you learn how to be more focused during the ordinary day, when you really want to and need to concentrate on the things you have to do – to do them to the best of your ability.
Again, what if you’re having a bad session of meditation – as a lot of my clients tell me “I can’t get into it the way we did during the two-day workshop”? Well, if you can avoid getting annoyed with yourself during meditation, you will develop your ability to stay balanced and calm when you’re having a bad day at work, when things aren’t going your way – or where something that might otherwise seem like the end of the world has just happened. Learn not to react to bad stuff during meditation and you will not react to the crap that life throws at us regularly. As a result, you learn how to act.
Then, of course, some of my clients get all excited about getting really deeply into flow during meditation. Fine, I say, but, just like a bad session, the good session passes too! Don’t get hooked on it – that’s not the purpose of meditation. The purpose of meditation is to discipline your mind – remember the normal mind is unruly, all over the place. The purpose of meditation is to gain control of your mental capacity – not to have a good time. So, just as you learn, through meditation not to react to a good session, so, in your everyday life, you become more balanced, not spaced out with joy when something good happens – because just like the crap in life, the good stuff arises and passes away as well.
In meditation, all manner of things can want us to join in in their little drama. Noise can be a major distraction – but only if you let it, because listening to and hearing noise during meditation can be one of the most effective ways of gaining control of your mind. Again, your body will start acting up – during a workshop a few weeks back I asked the group to start their meditation in a sitting position that they wouldn’t have to change during the exercise. The mere suggestion that I wanted them to stay completely still resulted in all kinds of shuffling and bodily rearranging – we all thought one of the guys had started dancing, he was moving so much. After we discussed the insanity of allowing your mind play tricks on you like that, the second session was perfectly still – everyone got the message, everyone understood that you choose whether to be distracted or not – exercise the choice during meditation – it gets really to exercise the choice between mindless reaction and real action during our everyday lives.
I also mentioned to the group that, being adults, they could choose whether or not to focus all of their attention on a particular area of their body – one area at a time. I mentioned to them that, during one of my recent one-to-one sessions, I had told my client, Peter, that if, as I had asked him, he focused all of his attention on the top of his head, he would not have scratched his nose! Understand? He should not have even noticed that there was an itch, if all of his attention was where he had decided to focus it. If you learn not to scratch the itch during meditation, something really interesting happens – the itch passes away! Like every minor irritation in our ordinary lives, the itch simply arises and passes away.
But, boy do we let minor irritations become major ones.
Just after the group session that I mentioned a moment ago, one of the guys, Paul, got a ‘phone call from his wife. She explained that their because their daughter was not well enough to go sailing with her school that afternoon, the school’s principal had banned the child from going on a theatre trip that evening. The kind of injustice that sends parents into spasm! She asked Paul to get onto the school and sort the teacher out – and, believe you me, Paul is the kind of guy that not only would have no problem doing that, he’d positively relish it.
But, Paul decided not to get involved in the school principal’s little drama – as he said to his wife, the teacher would find some other way of getting at their daughter – sooner or later. To quote Paul directly, he said “I’m not going to scratch that itch!”
You and I know plenty of people who are, literally, only itching for you to get involved in their dramas! Don’t we? One of my clients calls them energy vampires – they suck you in and bleed you dry. But, if you learn not to scratch the itch in meditation, you learn not to react to that nonsense in everyday life – let them pass – just like the itch, they’ll go away if you don’t give them any energy.
You energy – your mental and spiritual energy – is yours. Yours to master, yours to focus and direct, yours to give freely in taking appropriate action in everyday life – yours to deny to those who would wish you to react – yours to conserve and refocus when outside events distract you.
Learn, through meditation, how to harness and focus your energy – and that ability will become an integral part of your everyday life, changing you from a reactive normal ‘not all there’ person, who can only muster up 1% of their energy, into a cool, calm, focused person with presence. What you learn in meditation and apply in daily life, will change your daily life – dramatically.