Sought Through Prayer and Meditation, Part II
Your mind is your instrument. Learn to be its master and not its slave.
This is a follow-up to last week’s post regarding meditation. To briefly recap, I was given the idea that prayer is talking to God, and meditation is listening to what He has to say to you.
So, since I am attempting to be all about practicing what I preach, I decided to formally give meditation a try. That attempt, for the record, will be filed away under the category entitled Epic Fail. I guess I never really thought about just how difficult it would be to simply quiet the mind. If I think my mind runs a mile a minute under normal circumstances, then it goes into overdrive when I consciously attempt to slow it down. When I finally gave up, I decided that this is step 11 for a reason, and that I will get there when I get there.
But then I had a few conversations about the subject of meditation, and I realized I am not alone in this difficulty. When I did a little research into the subject, I discovered that “monkey mind” is one of the biggest obstacles to successful meditation. So how to overcome this obstacle? Simple practice. Keep trying and (apparently) it will get easier. I wish I could say I know this for a fact to be true… I don’t, but I hope to be able to post differently in the near future. I suppose it is similar to exercise, the more you do it, the easier it gets.
My Dad had a great expression for moments like this one, and I guess I need to apply it here: I’m not going to learn any younger!
Posted on July 2, 2012, in Recovery and tagged Alternative, Epic Fail, God, Health, Meditation, Prayer, Religion and Spirituality, Yoga. Bookmark the permalink. 6 Comments.
themiracleisaroundthecorner 
Thank you for a good laugh today (Epic Fail! Monkey Mind!) When you figure out the meditation thing please pass on your secrets.
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Your posts are always great. Thanks. I meditate quite a bit. It is always hard to clear my mind! I do a 10 minute meditation I received from a person I met in rehab. I ususally have to do it twice. The first time just to get myself in the right place and then the second getting most of the benefit from it. Keep up the good work. Mark
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Never heard of monkey mind (love it!) but have resisted meditation so far simply because it seems difficult…okay, impossible. Yet it’s the one thing I keep hearing works.
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I am so glad you tried this out. I laughed when I came across this post because I wrote about meditation today too. I always thought that if “nothing happened” it was a failure. But nothing is supposed to really “happen,” or at least for me nothing profound or earthshaking usually does. I’m so glad to see you talking about this topic. Good for you for trying!
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