Everyone’s experience is different. But I sort of want to write it down as a reminder to myself, because sometimes I forgot after a while.
Achieving a one year meditation streak is a small milestone in my life. Sometimes when I meditate, I will feel like I had some realizations, like my subconscious mind has been wanting to tell me things all along but I never really slowed down to ponder upon them. This is, of course, not to say that those “lessons” are important or anything. When they arise, I’ll still let them pass, without judgement, just like any other thoughts. But at the same time, I want to make a note on the thoughts that exclusively arise only during meditation, when I’m focusing more on the present moment.
No Moment Ever Returns
The present moment connects the past and the future, but the present quickly becomes the past, and the future becomes the present. I know that time does not stop, yet I kept on ruminating about the past, or worrying about the future, and lost my grasp on the current moment, until they too, became the past. And because the past keeps on increasing in volume, there can be no end to staying in the past.
But then the idea is not to discard the past nor the future, it’s just impossible since we are hard wired this way, and we probably shouldn’t also. After all, we can’t just forget history, and not plan for the future. The important thing, I guess, is to strike a balance between all three. As for me, that’ll mean to practice more mindfulness so that I can see things more as they are, engaging all my senses rather than evaluating everything in the mind all the time.
Perception and Reality is Intertwined
What exactly is reality, and what exactly is objectivity? I once saw an interesting video questioning our own perception. What is a chair? The person asked. Probably everyone will have no trouble identifying a chair when they see one, but when we really dig down to it, there doesn’t seem to be an answer.
A chair is a four-legged structure that one person can sit on? What about chairs that don’t have four legs? What about an item we identify as table, but has the common height of a chair, and is actually pretty comfortable to sit on, what’s differentiating it from a chair? When you break apart a chair, from which point onwards will it not be recognisable as a chair anymore? If an alien visits the Earth, how would you explain what a chair is to them?
But of course, arguing what a chair is is kind of pointless. But I hope to show that it’s quite hard to separate perception from reality. Does the chair exist? In the three dimensional world yes, but it seems that part of the chair’s reality is also formed by our human perception. A cat probably doesn’t call what we call a chair, a chair. Which again, might not be that important.
However, as I meditate I realized that a lot of what I thought is the reality change. The obvious examples are that “I can’t get out of depression”, “Only dying can stop the pain”, “I don’t want to try anymore, I just want to die”, etc. At first I would think that those were merely my perceptions, but after some time I realized that that’s not quite the case. During those dark moments, I really couldn’t see anything I could do that will help. My mind was empty, the ability to reason fell apart entirely, and I felt that I couldn’t do anything. I would feel paralyzed and very weak. In that case, was the idea that “I can’t get out of depression” a perception, or reality? It definitely felt like reality for me. There are a lot of other examples, but it seems that reality and perception exist together. What it means to me personally, is that I need to learn that everyone perceives reality differently, and there’s no need to reject myself or others’ thoughts because they “don’t make sense”, because we are just seeing things from different point of views.
Acceptance
This is kinda the lesson one for many people who just started meditating. We are told to notice the thoughts, and accept them as they are, and let them go. But I personally often forget this. I reject it when my mind wanders, I reject it when I feel anxious, I reject it when I feel that I’ve made no progress in meditation. And many times I couldn’t notice that I was actually rejecting the feelings until I noticed that I was.
Acceptance is really hard for me, especially when it’s about the bad memories and experiences I never wanted to go through again. And I can’t just flip a switch and accept, because my mind seems to always subconsciously reject some thoughts without me noticing. No idea why really, but probably to protect me. However, it seems that rejecting it doesn’t really make it go away, and accepting it, even though is difficult at first, seems to calm the anxiety down more effectively.
Now, these are just my two cents, so take them with a grain of salt! Peace :)