Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Why Meditation Feels Like Shitting Razorblades... At First

From Mindfulness in Plain English by Henepola Gunaratana:

Meditation is a tough job. It is an inherently solitary activity. One person battles against enormously powerful forces, part of the very structure of the mind doing the meditating. When you really get into it, you will eventually find yourself confronted with a shocking realization. One day you will look inside and realize the full enormity of what you are actually up against. What you are struggling to pierce looks like a solid wall so tightly knit that not a single ray of light shines through. You find yourself sitting there, staring at this edifice and you say to yourself, "That? I am supposed to get past that? But it's impossible! That is all there is. That is the whole world. That is what everything means, and that is what I use to define myself and to understand everything around me, and if I take that away the whole world will fall apart and I will die. I cannot get through that. I just can't."
 And then you barely notice that a ray of light is hitting you directly in the chest. And you wonder, was the wall ever there?

Read Mindfulness in Plain English here:
http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma4/mpe.html

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