Why Meditation Matters
Unsplash/Benjamin Voros
The only place refuge can be found, that it can be created, is within. By constantly grasping for what we deem pleasurable or pushing away what we deem disagreeable, we inadvertently search for peace, joy, love, and so on outside of ourselves.
It’s not to say that a warm home, nourishing food, and loving company do not expand our hearts and offer comfort, but it points to the fact that we cannot truly enjoy these gifts, truly understand where they’re coming from (from us), without having first found peace within our own frame.
Cultivating refuge within is akin to entering the eye of the hurricane, while the world is trembling and tornados are circling our periphery, there is a stillness and silence that steadies our movements.
But how do we move from the wailing winds and destruction of the storm to the quietude of the eye? For me, and many others, the answer lies in cultivating a meditation practice.
Meditation has an array of applications, from connecting us to inner wisdom to conjuring creative inspiration, from sharpening our focus to deepening our connection with feelings of love and compassion, it takes on the form of medicine that we need in that moment.
Meditation can also act as mechanism for nonreactive witnessing, facilitating the reprocessing of undigested thoughts, emotions, desire, memories, and so on. When we have a correct understanding of the world, namely that the world comes from us, we begin to bring conscious awareness to every thought, speech and action that we engage with throughout the day. We do this, because we realize that how we show up in the world is how the world will show up to us, as the world is not coming at us, but rather from us.
Though awareness is not enough, it is the first and perhaps most cataclysmic stepping stone towards mending the mind, towards becoming a conscious creator of our reality.
With that .. I invite you to get curious about your mind… your thoughts, your speech, your actions, and your reactions. These moments are the kernels of insight and wisdom you can build your meditation practice upon.
✶ Meditation is an embodied science … to begin a dialogue with the medicine of meditation, I invite you to join the Sacred Space Meditation Club, meeting time varies weekly on zoom - for more information, join Altar(ed) Spaces WhatsApp.
“Let us acknowledge our misery. Let us yearn for a place no one can scorn us. […] If we find peace where we live, there is no conflict that can disquiet us. But if the cause of our strife is within ourselves, then no matter how much we desire relief from the thousand trials of this world […] the results will be almost unbearably painful.”
- Partial Quote from The Interior Castle by St. Teresa of Ávila, 1515 - 1528