open-ended

Sometimes I think I’ve landed in meditation practice because of the indulgence it allows me. The 2 hours I spend on Sunday nights sitting amongst fairly familiar strangers is really just a bunch of “me” time. Since getting my little Maddog, I’ve come to understand why some mothers don’t want to be stay-at-home moms, why they sometimes need a “mommy’s morning out.” Sunday night is that time for me. I get to sit in absolute quiet where a sniffle or someone’s cough jolts me from the solitude of my inner mind. I think this is indulgent, selfish and for me, absolutely necessary.

I’ve been a little off track in the last 2 months since I last posted to this G-dly project. I entered this project at a very peaceful and happy point and then I let the regimen slip and slide as the summer went along and then well, life slid a little out from under me and even though I knew that structure and practice would help get me back online, I budged and hemmed and hawed and stayed home. I think it’s because sometimes we push away even what we want, what we know is good for us. Sometimes I let myself dwell in the quagmire. I even nurture it’s unsteady ground.

Buddhists call it practice, others call it ritual. I now see it as possibly necessary. Something as simple as routine can get you back to “center.” I’ve been fighting the structure of religion for a long, long time. It’s partly due to my evangelical upbringing in that I saw G-d as something you were connected to with no veil. There was no ritual in which G-d was more present and so ritual seemed (and seems) false to me. But, now, after the shift I’ve recently experienced, I get the need for practice, for ritual, for adherence to what you know to be truth even when all else seems to be clouding that truth.

I spent the first 30 minutes of tonight’s meditation allowing myself to fixate on and delve into a topic that I’ve been trying to keep my mind away from. I saw that silent 30 minutes as the OK to let myself be free and indulgent, to not filter or analyze. And it was the most agitated meditation I have ever had because I let my mind dream and wish and not be in the here and now. During our discussion time, after the 1st meditation, group members talked about noticing when our egos begin their story building and how just the acknowledgement of that thought sequence can dispel that line of thought rather than allowing yourself to go into the quagmire and the twisted path the ego wants you to travel down. Oh My Dear Lord. It seems the more I go to these meetings the more the discussions are so relevant in my life.

I sat silently all night just listening and processing and during the second meditation I was more calmed, more OK with just being in whatever state my mind is in. Where I get the indulgent part wrong is the in the feeding of ego. It’s not indulgent or selfish to sit with others in peace and meditate on where your mind is troubled and help yourself to become untangled. It is indulgent to sit and meditate on “what isn’t” or “what could be.” And in this, this practice, this ritual, I will lead myself back to the openness I felt just a few months ago.