Today I thought I’d share an experience I had last year that sheds some light on the connection between desire or craving, a sense of identity and happiness.
Exploring this area of the mind is like peeling apart an onion, layer by layer. This blog post is an attempt to help you start peeling your own onion. 🙂
[…]
Someone was stabbing me between the shoulder blades with one of those big kitchen knives.
Or, at least, that’s what the mental activity going on in my mind would have me believe.
In reality, I was sitting in the meditation yurt, in a beautiful patch of desert way out in the Arizona wilderness. And my body just wasn’t used to spending 16 hours a day alternating between sitting and walking meditation.
Hence the pain in my back.
[…]
There’s a pervasive myth, here in the West, that expending effort during meditation is bad. It somehow means you’re doing it wrong.
There’s the expectation that meditation is supposed to be relaxing, goal-less and effortless. Non-doing, non-being and all that good stuff.
Well, as with most of these things, the reality is a little more nuanced than that.
I’m going to dig into this one a bit to help you understand when it’s ok to push during your meditation and when you should slow down and back off.
[…]