On Distractions and the Dance

You sit down to meditate. Within a few minutes, your stomach starts rumbling and grumbling for some food. A moment later the alarm on your cellular phone starts going off in the other room. There is a few moments of calm and then the dogs start barking at a rabbit in the back yard. A police siren screams down the street.

The natural, habitual reaction to all this is to label these things distractions to the peace and focus of your meditation. I believe the first step, however, toward really making meditation meaningful is the simple observation that the dance of life is happening. Meditation is nothing more than resting in consciousness. It is identifying with with formless, still base-point, or ground, upon which all of life springs forth. But what is consciousness without light/form/life, and vice versa?

There is the Ground and there is the Dance.
There is the Masculine and there is the Feminine.
There is the Source and there is the Expression.

These things that come up while we are identifying with consciousness are not distractions; they are the very life that consciousness witnesses. They are that which dances while we remain still. It is only because the light and life dances we know any stillness at all.

Meditation as Death

You've seen it before - whether on TV, a movie or even in real life. When someone is diagnosed with a terminal illness and they're given only a short time to live (of if they've come back from a near-death experience), suddenly their whole perspective changes. Every little thing - a pile of snow, a snag in the carpet, a bird on the barn roof, a bitter cup of coffee - becomes miraculous and amazing.

This is what meditation does. You emerge into the void, into a "little death." When you come back out, all of life's forms spring out from that emptiness and maybe - if you're just careful enough not to go immediately back into everyday (un)consciousness - you experience every-thing as astounding.

"Coming to Terms"

"The techniques of meditation practice are not designed to reduce active thoughts at all. They provide a way of coming to terms with everything that goes on inside. Once we have accepted what goes on in our mind as neither good nor bad, but just flashes of thoughts, we have come to terms with it."[Chogyam Trungpa, from "The Sanity We are Born With"]

Most of us think as meditation as a way of ceasing mental noise, of stopping the flow of mental chatter. And in some traditions it does seem to be presented that way (The Yoga Sutra, for instance). But I find another method much more appropriate, and that is simply watching what happens - no matter what it is. When I am able to do that, with compassion and forgiveness and acceptance, and begin to see thoughts as temporal and fleeting, then it is less likely that I will believe the internal voices or be dragged away in this or that direction. Then there is a peaceful Ground that is not swept about by the duality of up and down, pleasure and pain, good days and bad days.

In a related note, our church's pastor had a great message on Sunday that more-or-less speaks to this same topic. Click here to listen to the mp3 of: "Centered: Finding Rest in God's Dwelling Place."