NOT FOR ME?

I've heard it many times from friends when I mention that I have a meditation practice. It sounds good, but it's not for me. Heck, it's what I told myself for a couple of decades,at least, since other friends tried to encourage my interest as early as the 1970s. So I have no difficulty sympathizing with the sentiment.

For myself, I had no end of excellent reasons--reasons I know I share with many of those who express both tentative interest and reticence. Family was a great one: there were always people around me at home, and I needed to pay attention to their needs as well as my own. There was too much noise, too many distractions. Time was another alibi. There were always too many things to do. I had to get to work. I was busy all day, and came home tired in the evening...

But the most persuasive and persistent of all reasons was my head. I had learned from years of first-class education that this was the place for a serious person to be. My brain was always preoccupied with important thoughts, problems, memories, reminders. Each one of them called for my urgent attention; I'd never be able to slow this endless stream down enough to, um... meditate. Which meant an empty head. And silence. And a block of available time. Right?

I began to find it otherwise when I eventually sat down, at first for just a few minutes at a time. And I slowly came to understand that the purpose of meditation was not to switch off the brain but rather to train it to do what I wanted it to do rather than allow it to operate on autopilot and follow its own devices. There was work involved. There was a skill to be developed and honed. The point was not to shut the mind's activity down but to improve its ability to focus and concentrate; to make it function better.

So then of course I realized that meditation was, after all, for me. I have a resistance to saying it's for everyone, which feels/sounds too much like evangelizing for a religion. But once I work my way past that reservation I do, in fact, believe that the world would be a better place if meditation were a skill taught to and shared by far greater numbers of our species. Quite apart from--and in addition to--the benefits of a well-trained mind, it opens the door to the kind of breadth of vision, tolerance and serenity we could use more of in our endless quest for peace.