What is so frightening about the present? Our mind is constantly clinging to thoughts, ideas, emotions, memories and plans. By this, it creates a sense of self - our ego. We blend everything together like the artist mixing colours and creating a thousand shapes and designs on white canvas. Throughout our life we fabricate different versions of this painting because we can not escape the nature of change. Our ego gives us a sense of control and reasons to be here in this world. We take ourself very seriously. But what happens in the present moment?
Frankly speaking, the ego just dies when you are fully present.
In the beginning it can be scary as hell, when this sense of I falls apart. When you are only in the now, then there is no thought about future or past to create some idea of yourself, to worry or be excited. Nothing to hold on to, no pretended explanation for your existence. You are present in the presence of your own awareness. It is a very calming and joyful state, but for some, also a frightening experience. Just being for the sake of being. Resting in yourself. Everything is just as it is. You feel, smell, taste, touch and see what is really there, without any mind-made opinion about it. You are nothing and everything in and endless space.
Walking without walking, reading without reading - where are you?
Remember how many times did you walk in the forest, without experiencing the fresh air, soothing green colours and sounds of nature? It is because you were not there. Your body was there. But your mind kept spinning around some issues in your life, making plans for the future to escape the present moment, worrying about the past, to run away from now. But the forest is so beautiful, what is so frightening about just taking it all in? Why do you run??
Did it ever happen to you, that you were reading a page in a book, absorbing the sentences starting from the top... and when you arrive at the end of the page, you want to flip over and realise, that you have no idea what you have just been reading? Where were you? :)
Your experience is dictated by the mind's likings of the day.
We meditate to learn how we can fully appreciate the beauty of life as it is. How many thoughts did you already think today? In the evening it will be around 60.000 thoughts and most of them you pondered over repeatedly in an insane carousel ride.
During meditation we enter a space where we can lean back in the now and start being aware of the moment and the current activities of our mind. It helps a lot to take some time to become aware of the senses. To hear the noises to feel the touch or smell the air. Our senses create the base of our life experience. We add some mind-made opinions and emotional tendencies in order to fabricate a very unique, but nevertheless impermanent, reality.
Escape the hypnotisation and start seeing more clearly with meditation.
The more we retreat inside ourself, the stiller we become, the more we will be able to observe what is going on. We realise, that we are not the thinker, because we watch the thinker. This prevents us from identifying too much with the mind-dominated part of us, which is clouding our experience of reality and creating suffering.
We train the watching in meditation and can apply the knowledge in our daily life experience. A continuous process of de-hypnotisation. Make self-observation a habit so that you increasingly catch your mind slipping into the illusory past or future. Observe behaviour patterns and how you react to different persons or situations. Increasingly you will be able to do this from a very neutral standpoint and without taking it personal.
Feel the silence behind everything - the emptiness of the present moment
Don’t be afraid to become free and let yourself die every once in a while.
In my meditation, I will guide you into this space where you can lean back and start being aware and free. Join me on Zoom (dates on Facebook) or listen to my Audio meditation on YouTube.
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