Thursday, March 12, 2025

Thursday, March 12, 2025

“All our lives we are taught to look outwards,” says the Vipassana Meditation teacher S. N. Goenka. “We get accustomed to looking that way. But the only way to experience the ultimate truth is to look within.” Spirituality, Creativity and humanity are experienced simply by observing your own self. Paying attention to physical sensations, focusing on the knots in the belly, watching negative thoughts pass, by leads to self-understanding. 

Mindfulness holds our hand and points to our negative as well as positive emotions and thoughts. The practice teaches self-compassion and kindness toward others. It helps us to let go of mental clutter and connects us with our Authentic Self within. 

My introduction to meditation was in 1989 when our family moved from Pittsburgh to Massachusetts for four years. I was home alone, lonely, and restless. Fortunately, having taught Buddhism and Buddhist art for few years, I intellectually knew that meditation had the power to turn loneliness into solitude and agitated mind into relaxed mind. Yet I had never practiced it.

After my husband and daughters left home for the day, in a corner of our bedroom made myself sit still in silence. For five to ten minutes I sat quietly copying the meditative posture of the Buddha. In my art history classes, I had shown slides of the Buddha meditating while sitting, standing, walking. I had interpreted and analyzed his graceful postures  thousands of times. But I had never experienced the deep feelings those images conveyed.

I taught myself how to meditate. I focused on my breath and tried to be present in the moment. Within the first minute my mind wandered somewhere else. By the time I remembered to return to my breath, minutes had passed. Slowly but certainly, when I brought my attention back to my breath, over and over again, my body relaxed a bit, which in turn settled my mind and brought it back to the present moment. But after only a few such moments, my mind would wander again. On and on it went. I don’t know what kept me from giving up. Perhaps because the practice promised peace, tranquility, and well-being. 

Over the years I have realized it is better to begin with a guided meditation or with body scan the way we have been practicing in this group.

And now thirty-plus years later, I meditate, I journal my mental chatter has subsided, the static gone. I am at peace. Combined with walking and reading, nothing else provides me as much comfort, calm, and confidence as my daily practice.

When we awaken our inner Self, we are able to hear its wise whispers that point toward beneficence. We feel aligned with the universe. We discover that solutions and answers from the universe are always available… but they pass by us as we weren’t paying attention. 

When we truly realize that we are the protagonist of our own life story, we get jolted out of the slumbering way in which we have been living. We discover our inner spirit and feel fully alive.