New blog day 2 – aha!!! Not sure why I said that but I had to start somewhere.
Got up okay this morning, did my yoga although I got stressed out at the start because I was trying to light incense sticks which kept snapping (or rather, an incense stick which snapped in half, then I tried lighting the halves, then I got another one and lit it and every time I tried putting it in the holder it snapped again so I ended up with about five pieces and I’m running out of matches and the windowsill in the meditation room/spare bedroom is a mess of ash and dead matches and snapped bits of incense stick because I never clean it up, excuse being that I never remember to put a clean bag in the bin…) Well, that’s how my life is, even when I’m specifically trying to bring serenity into it.
In the end I sat for the extra ten minutes at the end of the audio file because my mind was such a mess during the yoga and the sitting, though when it’s like that I’m not sure whether sitting for longer actually adds anything to what happened in the first place. It’s hard for me to distinguish ‘meditation’ from ‘sitting and thinking about crap’, although I’m pretty sure that most of what I do is the latter, and that can happen at any time, not just when I’m sitting in my meditation room on a cushion on the floor. So is it worth persisting even when you feel that way? Most of what I read and know about meditation implies that it is, and that that happens to everybody, but I think: ‘well, they don’t know exactly HOW crap my mind is, and I’m probably much crapper than them, they just don’t realise…’
I think that’s why I give up such a lot. But there again, I give up on everything – and probably for the same reasons.
I think I’ve got to a good place in terms of letting go of the idea that happiness is to be found ‘out there’ – in material things, external circumstances, other people etc etc. I don’t do the: ‘I’ll be happy when/if…’ thing any more, but there again, I don’t think I’ve taken that seriously for years. But… my therapist, B, talks about being kind to myself, doing the things that make me happy – and how is that not looking to external things? Maybe it’s a matter of degree – a world cruise vs popping to the café for a cream tea to improve my mood for an hour or so, something like that. Are café-sitting, cream teas and crochet forms of addiction? The contentment they induce doesn’t always last that long, but at least they’re relatively cheap, non-damaging and easy to reproduce. And I’ve yet to start escalating on to a harder version of any of them (interesting to contemplate what that might be).
Side-tracked again. What was I going to move onto? The idea that happiness is found in getting to know ‘one’s true self’. Ah, that’s a lovely can of worms for another time.