It can be helpful to think of meditation as renewal time for our body-minds. The space of meditation, at least Zen meditation, involves a realignment of the self with the universe.
Getting caught up in activity can invite us to assert the self against the world, especially when we care deeply about what we’re doing. We get busy trying to understand, maneuver, express, create, change, hurry, finish, resist, and come up with an effective plan. Our actions may even be fruitful, but operating like this takes its toll. Our perspective shrinks. Our sense of ease and joy become contingent on the outcomes of our activities. A subtle but pervasive sense of imperative starts making everything more stressful.
When we sit in meditation we allow ourselves to just be. We try to be completely silent and still internally as well as externally. We try to refrain from commenting on anything – not judging anything good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant, righteous or terrible. This silence is not about refraining from judgment because judgment is bad, agitating, or will interfere with our pleasant meditation. It’s not about pushing our legitimate concerns out of our mind so we can feel happy and calm. This meditative silence is about connecting with our living body-mind, a seat of awareness that doesn’t want to be constantly commenting, evaluating, and deciding. Our living self finds this moment inherently worth it, even with all of the suffering happening in the world. Not despite all the suffering, as if we were deciding, on the balance, that life has more good in it than bad. No – in that silent aliveness there is a vibrancy and willingness independent of conditions.
Not all moments of meditation are perfectly like this, of course, but being able to settle into this silence for even a little while is immensely beneficial. Having meditated, we can go about all of our activities with increased gratitude for the simple fact that we’re alive to do them.
When we pay attention to what’s happening in the world, we need to sit more often. We expose ourselves to the suffering and need in the world, and it arouses our compassion and concern. We allow our imagination free reign to come up with ways to help, arousing our excitement and ambition. It’s pretty easy to start asserting the self against the world again. Before we know it, this “little self” is stressed… and frankly, less effective. So then we renew ourselves in silence and stillness and reconnect with the aliveness that is always there under all the activity.
How do you make space for silence in your life?
Photo Credit
Meditation by Sebastien Wiertz via Flickr – Creative Commons License BY 2.0
