{"id":1530,"date":"2015-03-06T02:05:01","date_gmt":"2015-03-06T00:05:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/?p=1530"},"modified":"2015-03-06T02:14:15","modified_gmt":"2015-03-06T00:14:15","slug":"preferred-mind-states","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/?p=1530","title":{"rendered":"Preferred Mind States"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Meditation\"<\/p>\n

I was meditating tonight, and going into the meditation was in a fantastic mood. I’m starting something new, which always excites me (it’s the persisting that’s the downer), and had been listening to Eddie Vedder’s Acoustic Songs.<\/p>\n

A common trap in meditation is to judge a session as “good” or “bad”, and usually it’s “good” if we’re not having many unpleasant thoughts, or many thoughts at all. We can easily take an effect<\/em> of meditation, less unconscious engaging with thoughts, and make a goal<\/em> of reducing thoughts. All this ends up doing is suppressing thoughts, leading to a kind of dullness.<\/p>\n

I was having a “good” session because I felt great, not because there weren’t many thoughts. I wasn’t really doing much meditation – my mind was engaged and hurtling forwards to all the future possibilities, as it usually does.<\/p>\n

At the recent retreat I was on, we spent some time on preferred mind states. It’s a paradox in that everyone meditates in order to feel better, become better, yet this grasping after a particular state is one of the blockages. We reject our current state, and wish for some improved future state. Materialists fall into the trap of saying something like “When I buy my new car I’ll be happy”, meditators say “when I progress more in my meditation I’ll be happy”.<\/p>\n

I was feeling really sick on one of the days on the retreat. The kind of day which I’d normally spend groaning in bed feeling sorry for myself. Instead, I meditated. It wasn’t fun, but it was interesting, because I was meditating in the kind of state I normally wouldn’t be. It helped me see a mindstate I usually take into meditation.<\/p>\n

It’s so easy to look for preferred mind states in meditation, as a result of meditation, and before we start meditating. We may not even start to meditate if we don’t feel “in the right space”.<\/p>\n

Instead, try some radical acceptance. However you’re feeling, whatever’s coming up.<\/p>\n

Related Posts:<\/p>\n