I recently started teaching a new class in Cape Town. I’ve taught meditation and spiritual practise for years. I think I was lucky to start out with that in Durban, South Africa. Durban is warm and relaxed, informal, and possibly underserved – my services were well received. The way I teach is unorthodox, a fact which unfortunately had escaped me recently and caused me some problems. It’s unorthodox because eventually, on my own path, orthodoxy stopped working for me.
I realised that my practice had helped me develop a very strong ability to be present, to stay in the moment, to be mindful, to have a witnessing consciousness. If you have experience in a typical school of meditation you may recognise some of those phrases as the kind of ‘goals or aims’ of meditation. They’re most certainly fabulous tools to develop.
I also experienced some wonderful expanded states of consciousness. While it’s almost never stated as a goal it is completely delightful in the experience of the mind becoming still, empty, especially if the heart is developed. It’s not a goal but it is healing. You are in the very centre of existence, of life, at one with the source, in oneness, divine. There’s an eternal list of descriptions made by those who have touched it.
The traditional methods make light of what’s arising in consciousness – the things that pop into your mind, the thoughts, the feelings, the emotions and the sensations. ‘Like clouds drifting by’, ‘let it go’, ‘it’s just a story’, ‘monkey mind’. I had been told that that stuff doesn’t matter. That I was the one watching and that was what was important. These days I believe that is only partially true. While I do think it’s an essential, on a spiritual path, to develop detachment from thoughts, emotions, feelings and sensations, they also have a point. All the things arising in consciousness have a point.
Here’s a very simple and I think relatable example. You may be sitting in meditation and your ‘to do’ list keeps popping into your head. You might think ‘let it go’. You may succeed with letting it go or not. If you do, you may find that you don’t get round to making the list, or you forget an essential item that was there while meditating. Perhaps you will get lucky and remember it all perfectly later although I have stumbled with that often enough. If you don’t succeed in letting it go, you’ll find your consciousness being weighed down and contracted by ceaseless thoughts of your ‘to do’ list. You may even start to panic.
My method in this instance would be to stop meditating, write down my list, thank my wonderful mind for the excellent prompt, and return to my practice. It’s almost invariable that when I have done that something else happens. Perhaps my mind will begin with the fleshing out of something I need to do, perhaps my mind becomes completely still and waves of grace wash through me. Perhaps I realise the urgency of something on my list and stop practising. Whatever happens, writing down the list allows detachment. It stops the ‘monkey mind’.
I like to be practical. I’m not a yogi living in a cave in the mountains. I am very much engaged in the world. Living in the world means that what arises matters. My life is my practice. Meditation is a tool.
The stuff that arises in me matters. It is one half of my meditation practise.
Almost any teacher of meditation will say it’s a goalless practise. And it is! It might make you more relaxed, peaceful, loving, it may allow you to be more present, it may also cause awkward things to arise in your mind! You may feel very uncomfortable. You may have an experience of unadulterated bliss, you may be stuck with your shopping list. A common instruction would be to ‘become present with what is’. It’s an instruction that somewhat points to the importance of ‘what is’ and obviously points to ‘presence’. All meditation practises will hep you to become more present, more able to witness yourself, more detached.
Extrapolating my example of the ‘to do’ list. Taking care of what’s arising has two very beneficial outcomes. The one is that my life runs smoother because I have made the list – responded to what’s arising – the other is that I can return to my practice without being distracted -detachment.
I teach a way to strengthen the witnessing consciousness, to turn awareness inward, to meditate but I also teach how to convert the potential of what is arising in consciousness into things that help your life.