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When I learned Vedic meditation, I felt myself changed in some profound way immediately. I felt myself in contact with some new part of myself. I felt something open up so that I knew there was growth available to me that I hadn't known a day before. In a word, I felt hope for myself, for my life. Hope for change. Hope for happiness.
As a teacher I hear stories of the changes people go through. I watch people grow, from learning meditation and then on through the years as they continue the practice. I have people report changes that are absolutely transformational, such that from one day to the next they are almost different people: someone seemingly incapable of happiness just is, for no apparent reason. Someone so painfully shy as to seem incapable of socializing is at a party now, laughing and chatting and making some other shy person feel more at ease. Someone who's spent a lifetime angry and judgmental suddenly is perfectly content just to hang out and do... whatever.
Interestingly enough, there are times I mention change I've noticed in someone and they seem surprised, as if they hadn't even noticed the change in themselves. Yet I can ask 20 people in a room, "Doesn't so-and-so look about 10 years younger, and a hundred times happier?" and everyone of the 20 will nod and smile and say yes.
Our job with each other is to reflect how we change. It's often hard to recognize for ourselves from within. And it's perhaps even more important that we remind each other, and ourselves, of what life used to be like, before we began meditating. Why? Because the other thing I've observed over the years is that our human mind is so very, very powerful that, even if the change I experience today is miraculous and life-changing, within three or four days my mind will absolutely have normalized this new state. In other words, if I have spent my lifetime seeing my world as a half-empty glass, it doesn't matter what gift I receive in consciousness (or in relative world terms, either); if I don't make the effort to correct my intellect and change the way I perceive the world, within a very short time, I'm once again going to be seeing my world as a half-empty glass.
As we meditate, we contact the place of bliss each day. We let go of stresses, becoming more and more capable of experiencing joy in our world. Along with this practice, though, we must each day correct and redirect our thinking in order to allow ourselves to experience the joy that is becoming available to us.
When they train baby elephants, they put a chain around one of their legs and stake it to the ground. The elephant has a little space to move, but cannot go beyond the distance the chain allows. As the elephant grows, they continue to use a stake and a chain to keep the elephant in check when he or she is not working. Even after the elephant has grown to her full size and easily could pull up the stake, she doesn't. Her mind cannot even conceive of trying to pull the stake up, because she accepted the infallibility of the stake at such a young age that it is part of the foundation of her world.
What ideas are part of the foundation of our world? Were we taught it's not okay to be angry? Or that we're inherently bad, or flawed, weak, useless? Were we taught that our work is not meant to be enjoyed, or that love equals fighting?
If we'd like to change, change is available to us. Meditation makes it so. But the change doesn't just happen. It must be built. Will I build my new house exactly like the old one? Or will I design a house that is pleasing to me, that makes sense to who I am discovering myself to be as I move forward in this life?
Today I will challenge at least one idea that limits my capacity to enjoy life.
Lakshmi, Ganesh Temple Elephant, Pondicherry, South India
Copyright © 2011 Jeff Kober
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