Symphony of Mind

This is a story about the symphony of our minds. Or the beginning of one, at least. It is a personal journey, but at the same time a journey many have travelled before.

It is about meditation, and self improvement, but also not about either, but about something more. It is about exploration through introspection.

Those who do not meditate often look at it with a mix of bewilderment, dismissal and admiration. Bewilderment because it is so different from what most of us are used to in our daily lives. Dismissal because it is often associated with spiritual practices we are not used to or consider too out there.

Admiration because despite this, it seems impossibly hard to sit there and empty your mind and think of nothing, and many of us have this image of meditators as involving serious monks with shaved heads and robes living lives impossibly remote.

This is the common image of meditation: That it means emptying your mind and sitting there doing absolutely nothing, in some act of impossibly hard self discipline.

This what part of my own misconception as well.

But while many practices do include work to focus on concentration, I quickly realised how wrong I was. My first weeks of meditation was on the contrary spent dealing with a cacophony of thoughts I had never had to deal with before, and compulsive thoughts that seemed strange and alien.

My mind was resisting, on one hand. My "me" voice in open rebellion at my attempts to quieten it. All kinds of urges to do everything else except try to meditate kept coming to the surface.

But suddenly I started picking up and noticing the impulses that were bubbling to the surface that I had previously just accepted as part of a single, united identity.

I was for the first time in my life noticing the hum and song, and tic-tock of all the impulses that make us walk around and do our things and talk and work and love and hate while we're stuck in our head not paying attention or only paying attention to the booming voice of our ego.

Meditation is not about being still. Being still is a means to an end.

Meditation is not about being still. Being still is a means to an end: To observe and experience that we are not singular beings, but a sum of a vast number of competing impulses; and to beyond that observe and experience unity with the wider world.

Meditation has a long history in religious practice. More recent is growing secular acceptance of meditation that has come with an acceptance that meditation can be separated from its religious background and still have tangible, measurable benefits.

An essential part of my journey into the mind was to focus on observing, and avoiding trying to label these experiences purely in secular or religious terms. Others will work through the science of why meditation works.

What matters, though, is that it does, and that it creates profound realisations and experiences as your journey progresses.

Part of that realisation to me is that while I derive immense value from the work done by Buddhist and Hindu meditation teachers in particular, there are other paths, many perhaps better suited to people who do not wish to become separated from their "normal" lives, but just want to be better, do better, feel better.

I want to tell you what I have learned.