Sometimes we feel like the slave of our thoughts. Our mind never seems to stop thinking at a million miles a minute, and we can’t slow it down enough to meditate. We would love to meditate, but just can’t relax. There’s too much to do, too many obligations. We are way too busy.
Just remember that the quickest way to reflect on the mental habits that hold us back is to question the reasons we give for not meditating.
And it’s not the practical reasons we give – there’s no time, I’m busy – because that’s just a weak cover, a mask we put on over our deeper resistance to meditation. We resist meditation because we have no relationship with our mind. When we sit quietly and turn our senses inward, the clutter of old intentions, memories, defeats, traumas, desires, and other mental projections floods in like a pile of old garbage left leaning against the door. We should have taken out the trash, but it smelled so bad we couldn’t sit with it long enough to burn it away with mudra or mantra; and that’s why we have no relationship. Our minds scare us.
Dropping our masks is a matter of breaking mental habits that keep us acting and reacting in self-demoting ways. You can do a perfect sadhana every day, or you can go to therapy, it’s the same relationship you’re cultivating. And when you have a relationship with your mind you can learn that it is a hierarchical relationship. You must be in control of your mind or it will control you. And how to control the mind? Control the breath.
Tuesday was significant for the planet. This is not a political statement. What happened, psychically, to human beings is that a worldwide mental pattern was broken. Every human on the planet who wishes to be part of the planet has dropped this pattern. There was no choice. The pattern is gone forever, powerless. This is what freedom means. It is not freedom from each other or for each other. Freedom is freedom from the mind; and it is only gained through conquest of the breath. No one who remembers this shall be a slave forever.
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