You’ve been wanting to get a solid Eleventh Step prayer and meditation practice started for some time. You even bought and read the book on beginning to meditate. So finally, one morning, you assume a comfortable but erect seat, close your eyes, and begin to focus your attention on your breath, perhaps even beginning to count the breaths.
And what happens? Complete failure! Within moments, the awareness is off the breath and your mind is full of thoughts about anything other than the simple breath. A memory of a conversation yesterday and what you should have said, or planning a conversation for later today and what you will say, or making the list of things you need to do today at work, or the grocery list, or entertaining an old familiar worry or anxiety …. Perhaps you try again. And then you just give up, get up, and go on with your day, concluding that you can’t meditate.
You have just had your first encounter with what meditation teachers call the monkey mind or the puppy mind. It’s not that your mind just at that moment started thinking about all sorts of different things. It’s always like that! You just noticed how scattered it is because for the first time you asked it to focus completely on one thing to the exclusion of all other thoughts.
So the practice now is to keep bringing the mind back to the breath each time it wanders off into some thought – like bringing the puppy back on a leash. As one teacher says, “It doesn’t matter if the mind wanders from the breath a thousand times; what matters is that you come back to the breath a thousand and one times.” That’s the practice. It’s that continuing to wake up as the mind wanders, and gently but firmly bringing the awareness back to the breath that makes up the beginning of a meditation practice. This is meditation … you’re not failing at it … you’re doing it!
And each time you wake up and bring the mind back to the breath, you have the experience of separating yourself from your thoughts. You might even think of this as the definition of meditation – the experience of yourself as other than your thoughts. When you wake up, you interrupt the otherwise ceaseless chatter of the mind seamlessly moving from one thought to the next. Now, in your practice, there’s a break — as you bring the mind back to the breath — where there is, for the smallest of moments, no thought. Your meditation practice has begun.
Wishing you all the best in recovery,
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