Meditation How To: Allowing
Remember when you were working to bring your body under control while in meditation? How did you go? In the end, it’s best to come to some level of peace in the body before launching yourself into your meditation. I follow a process a bit like this:
- Decide to turn up for my meditation practice
- Ensure I’m not going to be disturbed
- Get myself settled, cushion, shawl/rug, meditation journal and pen
- Light a candle or incense just to help me get in the mood and focus a little
- Relax – first the body and then the mind.
I do the “Relax” part slowly, using my breath to help me gradually release any tension, tickles and the like from my body. It usually takes me between three and five breaths before I turn my attention to my mind.
Again, I use my breath to help me focus my attention on finding the quiet bits within my thought stream. As I lose my focus and start interacting and following my thoughts (yes, it happens to everyone!) I have come to realise that my body gradually becomes tense again. It’s this tenseness or twitchiness often, that alerts me to the fact that I’m lost in my thoughts again. So once again I turn to my breath to settle my body again and then my thoughts.
So now we come to allowing. It’s been occurring to me that “control” is doing and as such is at odds with our meditation practice. Meditations aim is Being.
So, if my body does an occassonal twitch or itch, I am working on being in “allowingness” (hmmm the spell checker doesn’t like that one) about it. If it’s not distracting me, I just let it go – perhaps I’ll see if there is some tension that needs to be released and breathe it out but usually these little things just pass on by if I remember to allow them to.
Likewise with my thoughts and emotions. If I try to ‘control’ them they sometimes just dig in and won’t stop but if I can get my mind and my thoughts to a state of relative ease, then just allow the thoughts and images to just float in and out of my mind without engaging with them, I find they come and go, come and go…. come and go……….come and go. With much less frequency.
The Allowing of the body and the mind to do what they are designed to do seems to act as a soothing influence on their activity. The saying “What We Resist, Persists” really seems to apply here. So if you are having trouble with “Control” why not give “Allow” a go and see how it serves you.
May your dreams be vibrant and joyful.
