The older I get the more I understand the importance of peace, and the more I see it is individuals and groups of individuals that make peace possible. It is not inevitable. Meditation is a pathway to peace on an individual level, which is why I like meditation.
This is perhaps the best time of my life, not because everything is perfect, but because one morning I brought out my lonely exercise mat from storage and started using it again. I sat in a chair put on a timer and started meditating again. Thank God it stuck.
What is the difference in my life when I am or am not doing that? It is the difference of being in the flow or not, and everything that makes my life work and prosper is contingent on being in the flow, meaning in sync with myself and life.
Meditation helps with many things including body awareness. I become aware of my body because for a period of time, I am not driven by the thoughts running through my mind. The mind is taken off-line for maintenance and rest while I sit there, and in doing that all these sensations from different parts of my body which were drowned out by my thoughts now have the opportunity to bubble up. I didn’t realize there was pain in that part of my left leg, now I feel it.
I feel hot in some places, and cold in some places. I feel the effects of so much walking in my feet. I feel how a mind feels when it was thinking, thinking, thinking, and now it is not. I become aware of what the different parts of my head inside and out feel like at rest.
Another byproduct of stilling the mind in meditation is, it also stills the other aspects of the psyche: emotions, motivations, urges. In fact, everything that makes me feel like me just vanishes like it was just a narrative played on a CD which is now turned off.
All these other things become clouds drifting by. The deeper I go the more I see what drives a person is the inner dialogs of that person, some of it conscious, some of it not. As I see it, it no longer drives me.
In my early days of meditating this was the WORST part. If the narratives playing through my mind weren’t me, then who is me? What is me? AHHHHHH!
That is kind of how the meditations went.
Paradoxically once I got more comfortable with meditating, that aspect of it became the BEST part. I first realized there was a Me under the me. The silence was where the Me lived and the incessant chatter of the mind up to that point was mostly throwing constant noice and chatter into the mind. I never listen to Me the stillness, only me the chatter.
Later as I got better at meditating, I could sit in the silence of the mind and realized the mind was like the planner, and calculator. It was important, but there was another part of me which was more aligned with who I actually was. When I took time to be with THAT part of myself, the mind stilled, then grew more clear and rational.
The mind had taken its rightful place as the servant to my peaceful center, which brings me back to peace. When I talk about peace, I mean several different things. Actual peace… I don’t like physical violence because I think it is preventable. I don’t like countries to fight with each other because I know a lot of innocent people are harmed by that.
But, my own life isn’t wracked with that kind of conflict and I hope it never is. I don’t have people in my life who are physically violent with me, so what do I mean peace? Don’t I already have it?
Another level of the word ‘peace’ for me is freedom from distraction of my own aberrant thoughts wasting my time. When it isn’t distracting me with what isn’t important, I can and do focus on what IS important.
The ability to have that level of peace for a long period of time makes the difference whether I go toward the highest my life can be, or whether I wither away lost in distractions from within and distractions from without.
It isn’t that relationships or the outer world go away in chapters I am meditating, it is that I engage from a higher energy vibration than before and there are better outcomes. In my experience, that is the difference between thriving and prosperity in relationships and in all other forms, vs. just barely getting by in life.
I’ve lived long enough to be able to look upon chapters of life where I engaged in meditation, self-care, and creative outlets like painting, and writing and chapters where I didn’t. I can see the vast difference between the two. So it begs the question, then why would I ever let any time at all, even one day, pass where I don’t engage with what I know works?
It is a chicken and the egg thing. When I get bogged down with fatigue, grief, or confusion, I tend to see self-care in THAT moment as giving myself a break from anything that is non-essential.
Believe me, it is VERY EASY to label sit-ups or the emotional work required as non-essential in those moments. Yet the paradox is, if I pioneer (even suffer) through those early days of doing the exercise and meditation anyway, it clears the fatigue, grief and confusion. So it depends on which voice wins, the motivated one or the exhausted-beyond-reason one.
I’ve been grateful to my new housing arrangement for giving me the space and agency to set up the exercise and prayer/meditation areas in permanent easily accessible areas. In this short time, it has already made a profound difference.
Do I have the normal concerns everyone has in life? Yes. I have a physical body, human relationships and I live in this physical reality filled with opportunities and hazards. But thanks to the practices I have grown to believe in through the years, the battles I face in this life-reality aren’t in my own mind.
If they aren’t there, then they don’t need to be anywhere because on the personal level I have agency. I can’t always choose what comes into my life, but I can always choose to handle it peacefully and in doing so, things tend to work out in the end.
Do my self- care and prayer/meditation activities have any effect on the preventing or stopping of physical wars in the world? I do believe in the power of prayer but some things are large enough to require a group effort.
One thing I know for certain is, it won’t be me who is contributing to the starting of the wars. On my side I am praying for peace.