meditation

My experience with meditation has been long, varied, and often unfruitful. There was a time, when I was much younger (perhaps 20 years ago?), that I practiced meditation regularly, sometimes as often as twice a day. I was just discovering yoga and had been immersing myself in eastern philosophy and, as luck would have it, my professor and friend brought our class to a zen center in the santa cruz mountains. Immediately, I fell in love with the idea of meditation. But in practice, I found it was quite difficult to do.

What I discovered was a lot of monkey chatter. I would later come to call this "thoughting" since most of it didn't involve actual thinking, but rather random acts of thought just sort of happening independently and without much (if any) conscious direction. It was a little horrifying. Even on those rare occasions in which I could settle the noise down a bit and begin to approach something like stillness, no sooner than I was beginning to experience what I think may have actually been real meditation, the monkey mind would start up again and exclaim, "Look! You're doing it!" or some other nonsense, and before I was even finished patting myself on the back, the moment was lost to me...

My understanding is that this experience is quite normal and that a lot of the practice of meditation involves just showing up to the practice and putting in the time, much like what established writers seem to do with their writing practices. Show up. Pay attention. Put the time and effort into the practice. And, maybe, hopefully, if you're lucky, the rest will eventually sort itself out. So, I am embarking on yet another effort to get down with a solid meditation practice. So far it has not been terribly fruitful. It seems as though there is more monkey chatter now than ever. I'm choosing to view this as the result of churning up a lot of stuff internally through my engagement with yoga and yoga school lately, and that, having now been churned up, that junk is free to dissipate and get flushed out with any other unnecessary garbage. This is my current operating theory anyway. Wish me luck.