A meditation practice allows us to become aware of the external factors surrounding us. We can learn to maintain our state of being the same despite those distracting elements.
Stress shrinks our thinking
Under a stress response, our thinking becomes narrowed. As our mind believes to be under threat, it can only focus on survival and eliminates all energy-consuming activity that isn’t necessary for survival. Our mind loses its ability to think creatively.
Relaxation techniques, such as breathing, activate the opposite bodily reactions. While our parasympathetic nervous system is active, we can start trusting that we are safe again, and let go of our stressors. We are able to come out of that dark tunnel and feel natural joy and energy again.
When you find yourself stressed, try this meditation to invite openness and creativity back into your day.
Practice meditation: Break the walls in your garden.
It’s time to take a moment to sit down, breathe consciously, and let the awareness in.
Breathe in and let go of everything on the exhale. Allow the pain, resentment, and past decisions to dissolve with your breath. Keep breathing and feel your muscles letting go of the tension as you’re letting go of everything that’s holding you back.
Visualize
Imagine a garden. See yourself standing in the garden surrounded by green plants, trees, and flowers around you. Hear birds singing in your garden. As you’re standing in the garden, you notice that the garden is surrounded by brick walls. Notice how those walls have become part of the garden with time and are covered by plants and leaves.
Now imagine a football-sized ball in your hands inviting you to play. You throw the ball toward the wall, and it bounces back to you. You notice it’s stained by the dirt from the wall it touched.
You throw the ball again, this time so high in the air that it ends up on the other side of the wall. To get to the ball you’ll need to break down the wall, find a detour, make a big hole in it, or climb on top and jump down.
It doesn’t look like an easy task, so you start weighing whether it’s worth it to go after the ball or to stay where you are in your peaceful garden surrounded by the walls.
This is the garden of your mind. The mind keeps walls in your garden to keep it safe but prevents the garden from expanding. These walls are your beliefs and conditioning. They take up space and can be difficult to break down.
Our thoughts are like the ball, which you threw to the wall and which bounced back to you stained by the dirt from the wall. Limited by these conditioning beliefs, whatever thought we get, our mind considers its worth by throwing it to the wall. Our thoughts return to us stained by the beliefs or conditioning from the walls in our mind.
A dream can feel like the ball that you threw on the other side of the brick wall. It flew so high that it went over the wall and landed on the other side. We find out that either there is a great effort to be taken to go and play on the other side of the wall, or we can choose to stay inside our own safe garden.
Reflect on your meditation practice
Let’s reflect and introspect by answering these questions.
- What are the walls, those beliefs, and conditioning that are limiting you?
- Can you recognize the thoughts that you throw in the air like the ball?
- How do the thoughts change when they come back to you after having touched the wall?
- What would it feel like to go to the other side of the wall to play? Freeing, exciting, adventurous, or scary?
- Do you want to go there or do you want to stay in your garden?
- If you choose to go to the other side, you must become creative with the ways to arrive there. Who could help you? Could you buy ladders? Could you climb a rope? Could someone fly you to the other side?
Meditation practice invites openness
Our life is the sum of our choices made. Sometimes it’s painful to stay still looking at your life, and the decisions you’ve made, and realize where you are.
To avoid this pain many of us have a coping mechanism called “busy”. It’s the best excuse to never do what’s truly important to you. But in the long run, that excuse keeps your dreams from never happening.
When we sit down to meditate and reflect, we can be totally naked and honest with ourselves in that moment of meditation. There is nowhere you need to go at that moment. There’s no one you need to hide yourself from. You don’t need to have answers to the questions. You can simply allow your mind to expand.
