Meditation: listening to your heart

Lately I’ve been getting the message that I need do more meditating. Not just sit for twenty minutes and let my mind wander, but really focus on being in the moment. In his book, When Everything Changes, Change Everything, Neal Donald Walsch describes meditation well, “I have to work hard to turn my mind off and just be with the moment and the experience, without judging it, defining it, or trying to make something happen or figure it out or understand it from my logic center. It is rather like making love.”

I am told that if I make the space for more meditation, my life will be transformed. Why do I want my life transformed? Mostly, because I worry a lot -- about making enough money, about paying for my new home, about the increase in the price of food and gas, about aging and the cost of healthcare, about the country, social security and the fat cats who call all the shots at the top, about earthquakes, radiation, and global weather chaos, etc. I am tried of all the worrying, complaining, resisting and blaming. Aren't you?

Meditation stops the voice of worry -- in Arabic, naf or mischievous whisperer. Meditation connects me to SOUL, the spirit inside and then I remember the soul’s viewpoint. The soul, you see, has its own agenda about why I am here in this life and what is suppose to be happening. I trust that agenda when remember it. A friend posted on facebook – “We are SOUL in a body, [this] helps me remember that anything but happiness is my choice.”

To the skeptics who would mock my words, calling me delusional, out of touch, a Pollyanna (and this may be my own personal skeptic) I say, “Why worry?” Worrying accomplishes nothing except to make me feel bad and unhappy. Do what you need to do. Take positive action. But don't worry.

A photographer recently posted a photo blog about the homeless on State Street in Madison, Wisconsin. These people have all the problems you’d expect -- drug and alcohol abuse, bad health, mental illness, smelly bodies and no money -- and yet they show more integrity, compassion and love for each other than most of us do for our own families. They even have joy. I am not proposing homelessness as a solution to worrying, although a brief visit might be very mind opening. I mention this because it shows me once again that it is not your circumstances that cause happiness or misery; it is the way you perceive your circumstances.

Mediation teaches us to discipline our thoughts, to control the ego of self-importance and open to the intelligence of the heart. It is the soul-ution to all the problems. ”Wisdom,” says Eckhart Tolle, “is not a product of thought. The deep knowing that is wisdom arises through the simple act of giving someone or something your full attention. Attention is primordial intelligence, consciousness itself. It dissolves the barriers created by conceptual thought, and with this comes the recognition that nothing exits in and by itself. It joins the perceiver and the perceived in a unifying field of awareness. It is the healer of separation.” Meditation teaches us how to pay attention, how to listen, how to be without judgment.

Things are so out of whack in the world, so distorted, violent and hateful, the only place to go is inside, back to the source, to the place of unity. All else is sorrow.