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Is the mind our enemy?
By Genevieve Simperingham
You may have read books that inform you that our mind is the enemy and we need to quieten the mind before we can hear the sound of our inner peace and allow our wellspring of infinite joy and love to burst through. In fact, this article brings the same message. I’m sharing the same story and sharing my passion to help people discover that happiness is just right here, just inside you, right now as you read this.
But, I’m also aware that most people need a lot more understanding and more convincing before they can just close their eyes and fall deeply into a state of bliss without being guided.
I have observed over the years of teaching meditation, that most people are just not convinced that the mind is the enemy and the cause of all of our strife and stress. The fact is that we really enjoy thinking. There’s never enough time to think through all we need to work out and work through. Quite often, there’s a rebellious voice that leaps out protesting wildly against this perceived accusation that the mind is the enemy. You may even think, how can these spiritual teachers claim that the mind is the source of all evil, when we all know that the human mind is absolutely amazing, the wonder of all wonders. Just looking around at the technology at our fingertips, computers, phones, the internet, architecture… is all truly awesome if we stop and think about it. All that human beings are capable of, what we’ve learned about life on the planet, the world that we’ve co-created, despite all it’s faults and failings is truly mind boggling and all this we attribute to the human mind.
Inevitably, when you close your eyes to meditate, your mind wants to use this space to try and work it all out. Your mind wants the answers, wants to figure out why she this and why he that and how you can achieve this result with this situation and what they really think of you. Your mind believes that it’s your one and only crusader for your freedom, your success, your uniqueness, attempting to express to yourself and the world your goodness, your value and your worth. To just switch the mind off and sit there in silence can feel like sitting helpless and powerless, like a defenseless sitting duck on the battlefield of your life.
Promises of peace and inner joy may sound nice, but for most people it’s hard to equate this with actually solving your problems in life, with coming into the strong, confident and empowered position that you’re working so hard to achieve in your life situations. But that is exactly what allowing inner peace to reign does equate to and that’s what your mind, i.e. who you identify as you, needs to understanding.
Inner peace is passive but certainly not impotent. It’s soft, but the source of limitless strength. To quieten the mind is to allow your Higher Mind to bring it’s clarity, insights and wisdom into all situations in life. Your lower mind, the one you use daily and identify with, is the worker and is a very hard worker. But your Higher Mind is the creative genius. Trying to figure it all out, especially anything related to the complexities of relationships, without the input from your Higher Mind is like trying to build a bridge without an architect.
The mind needs to be employed.
It’s easy to imagine meditation to be boring. Just as meat-eaters might imagine that eating vegetarian food would be boring and tasteless. They imagine the diet they currently have minus the meat, a plate of potatoes and three veg. – pretty boring we all agree. But, of course, being a vegetarian is a whole different world of very yummy exciting dishes and the buzz of feeling lighter and experiencing the medicinal effects of eating more of the healthy natural foods, herbs and spices.
For many people who don’t yet meditate, contemplating meditation can hold similar feelings to the meat eater contemplating vegetarian food or the smoker or the drinker considering giving up their addictions. They know that it would be good for them, but initially most of the focus is on the loss of pleasure they are familiar with. The experienced meditator on the other hand will delight at any and every opportunity to meditate because they’re in touch at a feeling level with the pleasurable sensations of deep relaxations, peace and calm and the corresponding beneficial effects on their life.
When the mind becomes quiet, becomes absolutely still, like the surface of a lake on a completely still day, a world of beauty and peace and trust opens up. The quenching of a very deep, dry thirst. In that moment of silence, we fall deep into that quiet place inside us and the whole world changes. Through the calm stillness, we can feel the energy, the feeling of our soul, our essence. We feel what we actually feel like, deep down and it’s always soft and soothing. It’s such a beautiful feeling that cannot be given justice through words. But we all know it, we all touch on it at moments in our life, at sunrise or sunset, in holding our new baby in our arms, when we fall in love, walking out the door into the sunlight at the end of the last exam of the year, seeing your best friend whose been away for a long time. These are moments when love touches us and we literally get a sweet taste in our mouths.
Imagine if this beautiful softness and clarity was there all the time. Imagine if we didn’t have to save for months, book a holiday to a foreign exotic island and finally land there and get over the jet lag to finally experience bliss, to finally feel totally and utterly free and rich and happy. This is what meditation offers. How boring is that?
If meditation allowed you to tap into this wellspring of peace and joy inside you, it would no longer feel like a chore, it would never again be put in the same category as denying everything that’s yummy for the sake of being healthy.
Genevieve Simperingham www.celticshaman.org
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