Notice that when the mind is quiet, often the first thing you feel is anxiousness, restlessness. Notice the urge to constantly be doing something. This is why meditation is so difficult for people. You meditate because you want to relax but instead the opposite occurs! Instead of feeling peace, you become frustrated, and I wonder how many people quickly abandon meditation because of this?
You
may feel you’re doing something wrong because you feel anxiety when you
were expecting peace, or you believe you’re simply unable to still your
mind. However, this isn’t the case at all, and the fact that you’re
feeling this restlessness, this constant desire to be doing something,
is the first step to overcoming it.One may be led to believe that the restlessness was brought about by the meditation, but it was actually there before you even started, you just weren’t aware. The mind combats this feeling by staying constantly busy, always doing doing doing. The mind is constantly restless, and moments of real Peace are few and far between. Real stillness has become something foreign, and this constant anxiousness has become “normal”. Of course, because it’s “normal” now people are barely aware of how much stress is in their life, especially because of the way our society deals with this anxiety, through distraction.
Nobody
wants to feel anxious, it’s unpleasant, but the way anxiousness is
normally dealt with doesn’t eliminate it at all, it just masks it over.
People keep themselves very very busy all day long, always something
that needs doing. Work, school, chores, television, internet, all of
this is often nothing more than a distraction, avoidance.
Subconsciously, people want to know themselves, but collectively, we
keep looking outside. In our society we place huge value on the
external, so what you do largely defines who you are.To anyone who’s really done some soul-searching the absurdity of this should be obvious. What you do is superficial, you can’t really know a person based upon their job or their hobbies. While those things may reflect something of what they’ve discovered and developed within themselves, their real being transcends all of that.
So
the question becomes, how do you get deeper? It’s so simple, yet so
difficult because our whole society is based upon denying this deeper
sense of self. We’ve created a million ways of distracting ourselves
from our authentic feelings and only a handful of ways of getting back
in touch with them, though in truth there’s only one way, and that is
you. Even all of the various spiritual techniques and practices very
easily turn into dry ritual, and then they’re just another distraction.
No two people are the same, yet people try to promote this
one-size-fits-all type of spirituality!There’s no escape from those feelings of restless and anxiousness that come when you begin to get in touch with what you’re really feeling. In fact trying to escape those feelings is what makes them so powerful. Anxiety is born of avoidance, and while constant distractions may mask it, they also make it stronger.
Don’t
just believe this, make sure you experience it for yourself. Can you
really just be still, and do nothing? What happens when you try? For
most, one of two things will happen, there will quickly be the urge to
go and do something else, or they will get lost in thinking. Both are
forms of distraction, we really lack the ability to just be still and
feel. Simply feeling without thinking, the simplest thing in the world,
yet a lifetime of doing otherwise has made it ridiculously difficult.
Something a baby can do effortlessly, yet near impossible for an adult.If anything is important in life, it’s this ability to simply Be. It may seem trivial, even lazy, but it’s truly neither of those things. It may seem completely ineffective, like you’re doing nothing, but that’s not the case either. When you’re simply Being, you stop feeding into the chaos of the world. You take a pause, and in that moment you can choose a new direction, you’re no longer living unconsciously. Living from that place of Being is how one can really make positive change, within and without. It’s not an exclusion of all that doing, in fact it breathes new life into everything you do.
Let us know in the comments what tricks you use to quiet your mind so that you can experience the world with your heart! Thank you for reading.
Article Shared with Permission from the Galactic Free Press, Article written by Will.
Via(Spiritscience)
