Meditation is developing and nurturing a relationship with ourselves—the parts of ourselves that know us best of all, but that we usually don’t have easy access to because we’re mostly caught up in our minds. That relationship is a source of peace and contentment: it neutralizes stress, anxiety, anger, and other disturbing emotions. The parts of ourselves we discover have innate intelligence that far exceeds the intelligence of our minds—even if we have Einstein-level IQs. Those parts know what we really need, what we really want, what’s really good for us, what really doesn’t serve us. When we operate from those parts of ourselves, we never need to figure anything out—we just know.
The mind is not our enemy, but it is a storehouse of patterns, stories, and scripts from the past that influence how we experience our lives in the present, even when that weighs us down and interferes with our enjoyment of life. We don’t have the power to just turn the mind off, but we do have the power to find an alternative that always promotes contentment in life, even when bad things happen. When we have access to those deeper parts of ourselves and can operate from there, life gets easier and more satisfying.
And the really great thing is that we don’t need Tinder or Match.com to find the right mate for this relationship! All we have to do is sit down, close our eyes, feel our breath, and come back to the breath when we realize the mind has wandered (or, of course, use any other form of meditation). It’s just that simple. Not easy, because we’re so used to letting the mind run the show, but simple. When we go on a date, we hope for a spark that opens something in us and draws us to the other person, and vice-versa. When we begin to “date” ourselves, the spark is always there, and it usually doesn’t take that long to feel it. And once we feel it, we want more and more, just like on a date with Mr./Ms./Mx. Right.
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