WHEN I FIRST began meditating
I tried to convert my mother. But Jewish mothers have arsenals
of truth that young meditators can't begin to penetrate.
"I already know how to meditate," she told me firmly.
"Really?" I asked incredulously. "How do you
do it?"
"I sit at the window of my apartment with my coffee in
one hand and a cigarette in the other," she explained.
"Then I just look out at the world going by, and my mind
don't function. I don't think happy thoughts and
I don't think sad thoughts. I don't think any thoughts
- it's the best part of my day."
Now, many years later, I recognize that my mother was far closer
to real meditation than I was. In her own way she had mastered
her intellect - something I am still trying to do.
It is said that prayer is talking to God, and meditation is
listening. You cannot listen if you are talking. You cannot
access a divine frequency if you are flooding the psychic airwaves
with mental chatter. If chatter worked for you, you would not
need to meditate. But you do.
At a time when I felt troubled about a relationship, I attended
a lecture by a Buddhist monk. He made a statement that shook
my world and has helped me many times over. He said, "Since
all of your troubles exist only in your mind, the only place
you can solve them is in your mind." A Course in Miracles
teaches that although we think we have many problems, we have
only one: We believe we are separate from the Source that created
us. When we reunite with that Source, suddenly everything else
we thought was such a problem evaporates.
The best way I know to make troubles evaporate (besides watching
Star Trek reruns) is meditation. In meditation we shift frequencies
until the meaningless ranting of the fearful self fades to nothingness,
and we sit in the presence of love, where we were all the time,
but did not know it because we were tuned to an inferior program.
Yet simply sitting for twenty minutes or hours with eyes closed
is not meditation. What you are doing inside makes all the difference.
If you sit and think for the whole time, you are not meditating.
How do you know if your meditation worked? By the amount of
peace you feel when you arise. Master metaphysician Joel Goldsmith
recommends that you meditate until the meditation takes over.
When you get to the point where you feel so good that you would
rather not arise, you have arrived at the place meditation was
meant to take you to.
If the Jewish Mother Meditation is valid - and it is - any
activity that takes you beyond your intellect and connects you
with your spirit is a good meditation. If you write, paint,
dance, play musi
c, or engage in sports, you know there is a
"zone" you enter where the small sense of self disappears
and Something Greater moves through you. That sense is far closer
to the truth of who you are than the one who is trying to succeed.
You cannot try to succeed and succeed at the same time. As Yoda
suggested, "Try not. Only do."
The best doing proceeds not from a sense of doingness, but from
beingness. You cannot legislate how beingness looks; it can
show up through any form. I had severe judgments about my mother
smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee, but the irony was that
she was at peace with those activities, while my judgments were
keeping me from the peace I was trying to teach her to attain.
So the first step to real meditation is to drop judgments. You
have no idea how someone else should live; indeed you have enough
questions about how you should live. So let God be God in whatever
form God chooses, and give God permission to be God in you,
as well.
One of the reasons we love to be around children, pets, and
spirited elders is that they are delightfully free of tyrannical
intellect. They are not at the mercy of belief systems that
tell us we should be other than they are. They are not trying
to think their way through life; they are having too much fun
to have to figure it out. That's why Ben Williams noted,
"There is no psychiatrist in the world like a puppy licking
your face." Imagine that life is a big puppy trying to
lick your face; the only reason you don't enjoy it more
is that your mind is elsewhere. To get your mind realigned,
invite it to think in harmony with Spirit, which is always affirmative
and has a greater investment in celebration than complaint.
It's been over 30 years since my mother taught me the
Jewish Mother Meditation. Since that time she has gone to heaven
and I am still learning to deal with a restless mind that tells
me all kinds of things that simply aren't true. When it's
my turn to meet mom in the afterlife, I will thank her for her
spiritual insights. And if I find her sitting with a cup of
coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other, I shall not
be at all surprised.
