Mind the Beginner

Just sit and count your breaths. Feel the cold air flow in through your nose and out again. There is nothing but the present, no mind, no thought.

Sounds like a lot of new age stuff doesn’t it? It’s actually the basis of zazen meditation. Now don’t skip this blogpost straight away because you don’t like meditation. Bear with me here, I promise you it will be worth it.

What is this meditation all about and why do people spend so many years of their lives meditating just to be sitting there motionless and being totally unproductive. Don’t they have something better to do than just sit around doing nothing?

For most “westerners” sitting still and doing nothing is downright torture. Deadlines to meet, calls to make, mails to answer. A constant pounding of thoughts on our daily life.

Because we have the need to feel alive we take up all sorts of strange and potential dangerous hobbies. Driving a motorcycle, skydiving, drag racing. Or perhaps we take up some kind of art, painting, sculpting or gardening. What happens when you really get sucked into what you are doing? You end up in a flow where everything goes perfectly and you forget all about time and other things. In the worst best case “you” no longer exist. There is only what is being done. There is no thinking anymore, just the physical, just being, just the truth.

We’re in a constant search to get satisfaction from life. How do we do that? We must return to the present moment because only the present can let us connect with what is real. Only through that connection can we experience the satisfaction in life we seek.

A powerful tool that is used in zazen practice is labeling our thoughts. You see, we are not our thoughts. This is vital so I’ll say it again, we are not our thoughts. Every thought that comes up during practice is a distraction from what is real. We can choose to jump on that thought train and get away from reality of we can recognize the thought as not being real, give it a label (”Fantasizing”, “conversing with self”, “feeling guilty” and so on) After labeling go back to practice. What does this labeling do? It’s disconnects us from the thoughts, we no longer see them as us, but only as our thoughts.

We believe that our thoughts are the truth most of the time. But are they really? Don’t get stuck in that mental prison. You’ll cut yourself off from the physical reality of the moment. The truth is right under your nose, it’s right there. Seems strange that people travel the globe in search of truth. As if the truth can be found in a mountain monastery far from here. I think the label “fantasizing” would fit nicely don’t you?

See through your thought patterns and enter the experiential world of the present moment. If you are in an argument, realize that your thoughts aren’t you. Label them and you will start seeing what really is going on. Why are you angry/sad/annoyed? What are both parties in the argument doing? We are not our thoughts nor are we our emotions. These stem from our preconceptions and perhaps how we were brought up. We might even end up thinking so much we get paralized by thought.

And now for a nice twist: Our senses are the doorways through which we can experience the present. But, our senses aren’t instantaneous in transferring what they register to what we (or the brain) perceive. … can we ever enter the experiential world of the present moment? Or are we always experiencing the past?

What is the truth? What is fantasy…