Saturday, January 21, 2012

Right now

I am, as many of you have long known, prone to over-thinking and obsessing about even trivial stuff.

From a Zen perspective, the thing to do now, I think, would be to sit with this. But I doubt my ability to do that. I'm afraid I will either get so comfortable with it I'll just give up (an idea which already has some appeal, frankly) or work myself into a complete panic.

So instead of sitting with it, I'm sort of frenetically trying to keep my mind occupied with other things – anything, in fact, that will keep me from dwelling on this illness.

1 comment:

sweeney said...

In my experience, you may or may not be able to sit with this now, but your previous mindfulness practices, before all this came down, is what will be there for you. (Whatever "there" may mean for you personally.)

It is why it is incredibly valuable, in my experience, have a mundane but regular practice in your life, dealing with meditation when you'd really rather be scratching your itchy foot or eating breakfast or taking the trash out - or *anything* but sitting on a cushion staring at a wall. Because if you put off meditation because there is something else to do - there is always something else to do - you never get to it and it never becomes part and parcel of what you are.

So I would not be too concerned if you feel you cannot sit with this now. It would be OK if you can but it is also OK if you cannot. It is what you have been doing up to this point that will be there for you.