Meditation Teacher 7

Learn from the Interior Designer

Your home is a reflection of the inner self. We spend time creating environments both beautiful and functional, or messy and frustrate. In meditation we become the interior designer of our mind by entering into the peaceful sublime.

The breathing exercises that prepare one for meditation bring a silence and for many they find that silence at no other time. In the same way we do not leave a TV on 24 hours a day whether anyone is watching or not. We don't want the mind constantly churning out thoughts meaningful or habitual, or just to fill the space. Brining quietness, silence to the mind is cleansing.

Just as we get into stale habits in the house, we can find that our mind occupies itself with old thoughts, often unexamined. For instance we often make our minds up about something, or someone, and that thought is held even though life moves on and change occurs. We hold the judgments and ideas with supporting emotions and our personal relation and identities.

We may have a habit of the mind that when we realize that we are holding old material we feel a need to analyze it to death. We may even avoid dealing with something because of the effort, or spend time imagining dealing with something as a large task. We may wait in order to talk to someone about it. However when one is in a peaceful state of mind one can feel the stale lifeless ideas and old judgments, recognize them and let go. One has a sense of the quality of the feelings, ideas, and judgments. The intuitive discrimination awakens, and new inspiration can come in.

This letting go includes the releasing the need to analyze something as a habit of controlling our own thoughts. We are taught to make judgments about thoughts from an early age. When one has experienced this it becomes possible to simply stand back as the witness and open ideas and movements of the mind to expansiveness and peace. One watches the creative flow of inspiration transform our thoughts and emotions.

If we are not judgmental and dependent on maintaining our old positions it frees this energy for growth. When we are in the present moment our thinking, reasoning and rational is clear and precise we move from emotional reacting, to feeling. We don't identify with the mood of the moment or this or that particular emotion such as anger, but we have calmness as our foundation.