Cast Your Vote!
In September we’ll engage in an in-depth study of one of the following passages, and we’d like to hear your suggestions! Please vote for the passage you would most like to study as a satsang next month.
This week, we face a challenging area when making efforts to deepen our meditation: distractions.
Addressing distractions in meditation builds up our will power, or our “bring-back muscle.” Which benefits do you see when you are able to concentrate more on the words of the passage, and let go of your thoughts? Do you have ways that you keep this instruction appealing and fresh?
Distractions in meditation will be with us for a long time, and can be tricky to overcome. The good news is that we can always be working on reducing our level of distraction by being aware of our thoughts and actions in daily life. What are your strategies for helping reduce your level of distraction during the day?
The excerpt below is from Passage Meditation, by Eknath Easwaran.
Distractions
When we take our dog Muka for a walk along a country road, he sometimes sees a cow and dashes ahead to upset her. To prevent this, we call him back. Further on he sees another cow and starts to trot forward ever so slightly, hoping we won’t notice. Again, someone has to call out, “Muka!” He circles back. But after a little while his attention gets caught again, and he edges in front. This goes on ceaselessly.
Bringing the mind back when it strays is like that. But though you may have to do it many times, this is not a pointless activity, not a wasted effort. Saint Francis de Sales explains, “Even if you did nothing during the whole of your hour but bring your mind back and place it again in our Lord’s presence, though it went away every time you brought it back, your hour would be very well employed.”
Then, too – unlike Muka – your mind will learn. Today you may have to bring it back fifteen times, perhaps thirty. But in three years, you may bring it back only a few times; in six years, perhaps twice; in ten years, not at all.
Occasionally the mind may try the old recorder ruse. You are repeating correctly, “It is in giving that we receive,” when a garbled version comes on: “It is in grabbing that we receive.” If this happens, don’t become agitated and try forcefully to turn off this unwelcome sound track. You may believe that you can do this with some effort, but actually you will only amplify the distracting voice. By dwelling on it, by struggling against it, you simply make it more powerful. The best course is to attend more to the true words of the prayer. The more attention you give them, the less you will be giving to the garbled version. When your attention rests completely on the passage, there can be no attention on anything else.
So when distractions come, just ignore them. When, for instance, you are acutely aware of noises around you while meditating, concentrate harder on the words of the passage. For a while you may still hear the cars passing by, but the day will come when you hear them no longer. When I first moved to Berkeley, I lived in an ancient apartment house on a busy street. My friends said I would never be able to meditate there – “Nothing but ambulances, helicopters, and rock bands,” they told me. I sat down for meditation at twilight, and for five minutes I heard it all. After that, I might just as well have been in a remote corner of the Gobi Desert.