Fighting your Brain

At times the burdens of our lives or our minds can become more powerful than we would like.  Often, they force us to feel uncomfortable to say the least, and they have the aptitude to assert a great deal of pain and misery in our lives.

Many have turned to meditation to relieve the pressure and anxiety caused by just these burdens.  But what happens when the momentum of your mind is too much?  What do you do when your mind can not be quieted, and you can not begin your meditation–or worse yet, your meditation is continually interrupted by your mind?

The trick is simple.  Use your distractions.  If you find that you are at war with your mind, make your enemy your friend.  Allow them to distract you–but do so on your terms.  While you are sitting in meditation, when a burdensome part of your life begins to enter into your stream of conciousness, do more than just acknowledge its presence.  To do so, will inevitably become ultimatetly distracting and counterproductive.  Instead, turn its presence into the meditation itself.

What is this burden that is upon your mind?  What is it doing to you?  Exactly how much of your brain is it occupying?  Where it in a laboratory, what kind of tests would you run on it, and what would those tests reveal?  Use those problems which appear to be plagueing your mind, and transform them into the actual meditation that you are undertaking.

Meditation need not always be a quiet, zen like stereotype, the likes of which we all picture occuring on a serene mountainside in Tibet.  It can be far more flowing, far more whimsical and free wheeling than we would expect.  Particularly when we use our burdens as mentioned above, we not only engage meditation practice on a whole new level, but we begin to grow a new awareness about ourselves, and how we react to the problems in our lives.  It is with this new mindfulness, that we may begin, slowly, to grow a new and increasingly constant awareness into our daily lives thus mediating our burdens and achieving greater peace.