A post over at Zen Under the Skin got me thinking about meditation.
I actually haven’t meditated for quite a long time. Now that I’m not so busy, I should make the effort to get started again. Chalip’s comments about Insight Meditation, though, made me realise that once you get started on the course of meditation, it doesn’t leave you.
I went in at the deep end with meditation, which was probably the best way I could have done it: I went on one of S. N. Goenka’s 10-day Vipassana meditation retreats in Thailand, with no previous meditation experience. I can honestly say that it was a completely transformative experience: at the end of the 10 days – which were hard work, make no mistake – I felt completely renewed, with all of the negative emotion and tension that had built up over the past few years not washed away, but deprived of their power. The calm and general ‘glow’ of happiness that came from that course lasted for almost a year.
After I started my MBA, I did try to carry on practising, but it wasn’t enough, and tension and anger started to accumulate again. Before coming to China, I went on another retreat, which wasn’t as effective as the first – I think largely because I’d badly hurt my ankle just before going, and the pain from that was too much of a distraction.
Since I arrived in Beijing, I’ve only meditated a few times, but even so, the sense of awareness, of being present that came from the first course is now almost constant. That’s not to say that I don’t get angry, become emotional or do stupid things – I still do, too often! But the awareness of “this will change” is pretty strong these days. I need to real make an effort now to start a regular practice routine. I almost added “in order to get back to the state of calm I experienced after the first retreat”, but I guess that would itself be craving… I should just practice and see what happens…
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