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"I find my meditation to be kinda 'spotty' here lately. I have this whole list of things I want, things that I know are going to make me feel better, make my life better, and I'm afraid meditation is going to take them away from me."
The above was a report this evening from a friend and someone I taught to meditate. I told him I understood.
Before learning to meditate, my motivation in life--to find love, to find work, to create--was all about getting out of pain, or at least lessening the pain. It's not by accident that we have the cliche of the struggling artist, that we talk about someone willing to suffer for their art. The promise of the lessening of pain is a great motivator. The lessening of pain, the lessening of fear. The desire to accomplish this can make one willing to go through all sorts of uncomfortable processes, like delving into the depths of one's psyche to find the germ of a creative idea, or physically pushing oneself beyond exhaustion, day after day, to get in shape in order to perform better or look better, in order to get or to keep a job. Pushing oneself on the job, spending ten to twelve hours a day at work and a couple of hours each day commuting, just to keep pace with one's peers.
And in truth, great things have been accomplished by those of us motivated by fear of failure or fear of not getting what we want or of losing what we have. The drawback is, if this is your primary form of motivation, it means that in order to continue moving forward, accomplishing more and more, you have to put yourself into even greater amounts of fear and pain. You'll accomplish something, perhaps let yourself enjoy it for a moment, then you'll have to start worrying again to get yourself moving again toward something better than, greater than the last thing you accomplished.
Meditation gives us an experience of peace, of comfort and ease. We have a download of bliss chemistry, a quieting of the mind, a lessening of fear and angst. We start to feel better--about ourselves, about the world and our place in it, regardless of our accomplishments or lack of. If we haven't corrected the intellect to account for this and to find a new form of motivation, we may find ourselves unwilling to meditate, and maybe even going out of our way to find new things to worry about.
What can we do instead? What would another form of motivation look like?
As Vedic meditators, we are daily aligning ourselves with nature, with the wholeness that is. Nature is doing one thing only, ever: it is evolving. As we align ourselves with nature, we are aligning ourselves with evolution. We are volunteering to be agents for progressive change. We are offering ourselves to be of service: to evolution, to our fellow man, to God, if that concept works for you. And this is what we must do. Fear, pain, suffering--these are all of the ego, of the separate, needy identity that we always have spinning away somewhere in our consciousness. By asking to be of service, to be used by something greater than our individual identity, we suddenly find ourselves moving forward without knowing why. We find ourselves experiencing joy and happiness in the movement itself. We find ourselves in the right place at the right time and saying just the right thing to someone who needs to hear it, or smiling at someone who really needs to see a smile. We start to feel as if we are in our right life, and we begin to depend on that feeling, and then the feelings of fear and suffering become indicators of being off, rather than constant companions.
And the work we find ourselves able to do from the motivation of being of service, of being in alignment with this thing that is other than our ideas and fears and opinions and suffering, this work shines in a way we never knew work could shine. This is why we are here. This is what we are meant to do. This is how we are meant to experience life: full, free, joyful, alive.
Today I will ask myself what it would feel like to not be in fear, to not suffer; and how nature (or God) would have me be as its representative in the situation and/or relationship in which I find myself.
Man Pushing Cart, Canal St., New York
All material copyright Jeff Kober
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