Have you (been) meditated today?

I wrote the first of these blog posts, on 6th February this year, about a moment of awakening. Now, nearly seven months later, at the time of writing this post, I’ve had many such moments in which I was prompted to stop what I was doing, pause and sit or stand in silence for a few minutes. They are different from my usual morning meditations, which are intended. The former just happen.

These moments feel more like I’m being meditated rather than meditating by intention. 

They feel as though they just happen naturally rather than trying to make something happen.

You may have a favourite theory about the origin of such things – an unconscious urge emerging from the Id into the conscious Ego, in Freud’s terms, or a pre-conscious habit receiving attentional resources in more general cognitive terms - but to me it feels as though the meditation wants to happen and so, pausing anything else that was going on, it does!

I’ll try and make this relevant to some kind of awakening process in a minute but to describe what happens in a wee bit more detail: 

I’ll be doing something, anything - gardening, looking out of the window, listening to music, trying to write a blog 😁 or whatever. Next moment, my attention is drawn within, but not to some thing like an emotion or a thought or feeling hungry, but simply to silence. There’s nothing obvious that would grab attention. I’m just there, experiencing silence, stillness, inner peace and, for however long it lasts, it’s wonderful, blissful. And then the moment passes and it’s back to whatever was going on before...

These moments feel the same as when a planned / intended meditation gets to some depth after a while, and the mind gets quiet and everything feels wordlessly wonderful but without all the preamble to get there…

So, awakening to a deeper reality. QED!

P.S. One of the things I hope you’re getting from these blog posts is that the awakening process is different for everyone. If you are part of a religion or spiritual group that has a map of the awakening process then you may feel constrained to describe it in those terms. However, as I study it and talk to people about their experiences, they all seem different, both in terms of what happens and how they experience it. And, of course, that also means taking everything I write with a ‘pinch of salt’ (an English expression that means you can safely ignore it) if it doesn’t accord with they way things are for you...

Bibliography

Ziewe, J. (2013). The ten minute moment: A week long adventure in consciousness. Lulu Press.

Key words

meditation, being meditated, silence, stillness, bliss, awakening, 

Image

The light in this small chapel within Tewksbury Abbey came and went as clouds passed in front of the sun.