Find Yourself

"California," exhorts the California Travel & Tourism Commission, "Find Yourself Here."  Certainly I have been trying, and some of that finding, or looking at any rate, has been, well, very Californian.  Most especially this:  I meditate.  As with all self-help regimes and most people, I don't do it as often as I would like, nor as regularly, but I have certainly never done it before and now, I think I can honestly report, I do.  By great good fortune a near--close by, close to our hearts--friend of ours is an adept in these matters and was thinking of organizing a weekly "sit" even before I mentioned the matter to him.  The result is that I and a small handful of co-seekers get together each Wednesday for an hours' talk and half an hour or so of sitting with our eyes closed.

I'm not sure how to describe it less literally. I have no expectations, no demands, and no justification.  I just sit, pretty much every Wednesday, and I try to sit for a bit every other day, too (it is there, despite sitting, that I typically fall down).  I have abandoned any expectation that in sitting I would find myself in a state of non-thought, but tend instead to abstract myself somewhat from the thoughts that do arise.  This allows me, to the limited extent I am able, to view the flow of my thoughts, most often turbulent, sometimes reasonably measured, variable in any case.

And what does this view afford?  Certainly no great insights, no especial wisdom, and yet I do feel I profit from it.  Boredom, my great bugbear in life, has for some months been banished by the ever-present possibility (or perhaps threat is the correct term?) of my entering a meditative state.  I ask myself more frequently, if not frequently enough, why I am allowing myself to run away with a particular thought or feeling (typically my other great bugbear, annoyance).  And, with enough concentration, and more and more often, I am able to disassociate myself from my physical sensations just enough to lose a clear sense of my own physical dimensions, which is to say that sometimes, while meditating, my head, starting with my teeth and spreading outwards from there, starts to feel really, really big.  It's neat.

Felix has my number.  He asked Talia the other evening where I was.  Upon hearing I was at my meditation class he said "Oh, that's where dada sits and waits for something to happen."  Still waiting, boy, still waiting.

(For Felix's own meditation practice see this link.)