While meditating we’ve all had the experience of a blissful moment of serenity, clarity, or realization, only to be pulled back into the stresses and strains of daily life. That can feel quite frustrating and even disempowering. We touch the glory of the sacred and are thrown back into the mundane. We think that our experience and insights will change our life, but too often they don’t. Know that you are not alone. These fallbacks are part of the journey. When they occur, it's most important to recognize them and to avoid dropping into disappointment, disillusionment, or failure.
These back and forths are important and unavoidable aspects of the movement toward a more awakened and conscious life. The ego structure, our personal self, with its capacities and limitations is tightly interwoven into our existence. It both assists us in navigating daily life yet, at the same time, its habitual patterns and limited knowledge force us to live in a contracted manner constrained by our past history. Our personal conditioned “I” is resilient, insistent, tenacious, and resistant to change. It may help us to survive and navigate daily life, but it does not help us to thrive. This limited consciousness becomes our default operating system, overriding our fundamental and essential self. That’s why we are pulled back to it so easily.
So how do we first soften the pull of our ego structure and then how do we replace this false sense of self with a return to our natural and foundational self. There are many practices that can help keep us in-touch with our deeper self. Our focus is meditation. When we establish a stable daily sitting practice, we find that the perfume of this practice subtly and somewhat mysteriously finds its way into daily life. Early on we find ourself calmer, less reactive, more patient, less judgmental, and more open and accepting. With time these qualities will become a new way life that is sourced by our deeper self. There will be less of a distinction between our formal practice and daily life.
We also deepen and stabilize our inner connection in the midst of daily life. We call this self-remembering. We practice multiple short (2-3 minute) mini-meditations throughout the day. We stop, let go of all thoughts and mental activity and drop into presence and beingness, as you do in your formal practice. Then return to your daily activities. Your will likely notice a shift to greater calmness and enhanced well being. Together, formal practice, mini-meditations, and continued study and support stabilize our natural stillness and clarity.
Finally, consider the words of St. Francis of Assisi: Wear the world like a loose garment, which touches us in a few places and there lightly.” We are instructed to take our worldly experience and personal identity lightly, neither attaching to nor identifying with it.
The Buddhist say it another way – regard all experiences like dreams. We awaken from a night dream only to recognize it was all a mental experience. We take off virtual reality goggles to realize the visual display was only a mental experience. In both instances it’s easier than awakening from our usual “wakeful” day-dream and realizing that it also is a mental experience. A night dream, visual reality goggles, our daily experience are all the same, inner displays within consciousness. They appear real yet are as unreal as an echo, night dream, or the mirage of water on the distant desert road. In short, don’t take things too seriously as they don’t actually exist in the way they appear. We are told to wear our worldly experience lightly and loosely.
As we commit to formal practice and daily mini-meditations our understanding deepens, our perspectives shift and we find that we are increasingly living from the truth of our being.