Meditation: The 10 year journey to find that place inside yourself

This was something I posted in response to a Quora.com question but felt to turn it into a blog as well. The question was this:

People who have meditated for years, how much progress have you made? How much of this progress has spread into your daily life?

It is now over 10 years since my first Vipassana 10 day sit. I had tried meditating before that but never did very well, too distracting.

In 10 years I have learnt it really takes most of that time to progress, and realize that there is no end goal at all. That sounds boring but think of it like any PHD Degree of high status, it takes a lot of work and really a lot of that time you are not doing the work but eating or sleeping or partying.

So 10 years on and I use a meditation process in most of my day. Vipassana is great to learn, but you need more Urban Guerilla methods to be able to practice it in the modern cultural setting of Western world. Indian culture and Buddhism never took into account the strife and distractions of modernity so this is a challenge when you get home to introduce it into your daily life.

So I still do occasional Vipassana sits for deep immersion, but my daily focus is on meditating in the moments between doing other things: When I am queuing at the shops, when I am in the toilet, when I am making a coffee, when I am stood waiting for something I am meditating. It has, over the 10 years, become the underlying theme of my life. As such it has enabled me to slowly and gently re-direct the ship I sail in to better waters.

In 2007 I was a cocaine sniffing, sex addicted, smoking, party animal who had run out of energy and was crashing badly. I left the country I lived in and that was the same day I did my first Vipassana . The next 3 years were a battle in my soul to find my self again, but regular Vipassana sits became my light at the end of the tunnel and every free moment from work I went to one until around 2010 when things in my life started to improve. Vipassana and meditation had been the backbone to that process.

It is now the end of 2017. I am no longer a smoker, I dont need to fill the vacuum I had in my soul with drink, drugs or distractions, I still am the same person and have the same issues, but I now have a core place within me, one that I have etched out with meditation practice, and I know that even if I get stuck in a prison, with death as my only way out, and no one ever came to see me again in whatever was left of my life, I would consider that the most excellent opportunity to meditate. And when in that place inside, that I spent over 10 yearsetching it out with practice, like a prisoner digging a hole out of the prison and into some kind of peaceful garden. That tunnel is now dug. I go in there and I find myself at immense peace. It takes work to keep that tunnel maintained but nothing would stop me doing that now I know its value.

Meditation is a long journey and the most worthwhile one on the planet available to take, because when you realize there is no end goal as such, but rather being in a condition state where you are more focused on fully being, and not doing, Then you realise beneath all the madness of life, the endless doing of stuff, and the endless struggle, when you finally learn to STOP. A bliss is waiting for you to come and find it. It was always there. The drama and pain, is in, or because of, the things we do. Meditation is essentially about learning to stop.

Assume 10 years minimum as much practice as you can, Maybe part-time but better if it becomes a part of your lifestyle and your every minute is about figuring out how to use that spare time to meditate, without making it a chore you have to stop doing other stuff to do it.

That is the trick for the modern human Mind because we are so bored so quickly. Boredom and Frustration are your friends because they are your challenge and that never stops. Meditation is not hard, refusing the feelings of Boredom and Frustration is the biggest challenge you will face. They tell you to go and be distracted, read a book watch a movie, chase some women. whatever.

And remember your Mind is also your friend, not your enemy but you still have to remind it who is boss.

The biggest take away I can give someone, I think is what took me over 2 years to realise. That meditation should not be a painful experience where you torture yourself to do it. It can be fun and once you approach it with a lighter heart instead of intense trepidation, then you will be on your way to overcoming those challengers Boredom and Frustration and at some point you will be sat on the mat and you will feel this immense pleasure at just being alive with nothing to do at all. And in that moment you will realise what I said here.

good luck gwasshopper

It is the best path to actually be happy, as long as you dont enter it expecting results, but go at it for the hell of it and persevere, persevere, persevere.

Then one day quite by accident you discover what you were looking for :)

(This is a free to play soundscape for meditating. This is what I use to practice a daily meditation method called The Gentle Resonance that is offered by The Temple Space. The method takes 15 minutes to learn at most, and you can then use the soundscape to practice longer sits, or just use the method as you do other things in your day without having to schedule meditation time. This was the way I progressed when not in Vipassana retreats. For more info join The Temple Space Facebook Group )

#vipassana #meditation #lifestyle #bliss #freedom