BYC Newsletter #11

Dear Yoga students and those interested in Yoga,

Now that we’ve started opening each yoga session with a ten minute meditation to center us in the present moment before moving into a set of asanas, some are discovering that their mind races like crazy just when they want it to be still. “I couldn’t believe the trash that was coming up,” one person said.

Meditation is like putting our foot on the clutch of a car (if you have ever driven a stick shift) and disengaging the engine from the load of moving the car. The engine races crazily until you take your foot off the gas. When we sit for meditation, we are focusing on the breath or a mantra (some sound syllables), and taking our attention off our thought engine and our thought based sense of self (which is like the car). So, quite naturally, the thought stream, once free from having to move our identity, runs faster. As we take our foot off the gas, the engine and the car both slow down and eventually come to a stop.

Putting our attention on the breath is like taking our foot off the gas. The thought machine only exists when we give it our conscious energy, and when we shift our attention from thought to just being aware of our breath (which is life), thought begins to run down. We discover that we can be free from the thought machine. In time, the mind becomes one pointed on our object of meditation, and thought grows weaker and weaker.

This, however, is not the end of thought. There is nothing wrong with thought as long as it doesn’t fill our mind with problems and trash talk. A peaceful mind is a still mind. In a still mind, thought rises as creative insight or as useful commentary that carries no weight or stress. It is just some thought, little movements of the mind, like geese flying over a wide blue sky. The sky is not disturbed by the geese.

In a still mind we begin to live in the present moment where awareness enjoys life as it is, without labels or preconceptions of what life should be. Simple things become fascinating, like the stirring of a cup of coffee. The musical sounds of the spoon and the changing color of coffee, from dark chocolate brown to blond as milk is added, absorbs our attention. We discover that our everyday world is alive with designs that are like works of fabulous art or photographs. For the still mind, the eye is God’s paint brush, and the world is ever fresh and full of delights.

But, for the mind trapped in thought, the world is old, and today is always the same as yesterday. Tomorrow is only a fading hope that we will somehow experience life as we know it should be. But we never do, because thought is a product of memory and past experience, and it is always old. Thought also creates the false sense of me, which wraps itself in a story and goes through life lugging this heavy baggage. And the only thing we are taught to do is add more stuff to our baggage, falsely thinking that it will complete our thought created self. But it never does.

So the practice of meditation is in itself an act of freedom. We say, “Here I will sit (for one minute, ten minutes, or whatever) and just be who I am...I am unplugged from the thought machine...I put down my script and my program. I am not my thought...but who am I?...Let me see.”

Thank you,
Om Peace
Ed Conley

11/29/06

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