Why are you meditating            

 Generally people start meditating because they think meditation will do something for them. And it will. People who meditate tend to experience less stress, more joy, lower pain levels, better health and a greater intimacy with God than people who don’t.

Take a moment, before you read any further, and think about why you’ve decided to learn to meditate. Then write your answer(s) here: 

1. 

2. 

3. 

            Now, remember letting go? O.K. Take a deep breath, and let go of your goals. You will not achieve them by striving for them. Remember, meditation is about being - just as you are, right now, the way you are. For Christian meditators, this is the way God receives you, is it not - just as you are, right now, the way you are? So don’t try to change that.

If you come to meditation with the thought that “Now I’m going to de-stress” or “Now God’s going to show me things I need to know” or “Now I’m going to _____”, you have introduced a judgment into your meditation. You have decided that you need to improve or you need to get someplace, which means that who you are and where you are right now are not good enough. Meditation is not self-improvement. It has no goal other than for you to be yourself. Jon Kabat-Zinn, in his book Full Catastrophe Living,[1] says this: 

            This attitude [striving to achieve something through meditation] undermines the cultivation of mindfulness, which involves simply paying attention to whatever is happening. If you are tense, then just pay attention to the tension. If you are in pain, then be with the pain as best you can. If you are criticizing yourself, then observe the activity of the judging mind. Just watch. Remember, we are simply allowing anything and everything that we experience from moment to moment to be here, because it already is. 

            So, as we meditate, we allow things to be the way they are without getting trapped in trying to change them (this includes ourselves), and we keep coming back to the focus of our meditation. This will become very important when we start contemplation, or meditation on the presence of God within us. When we come to God just as we are, we come knowing full well our need of His grace and we are thus fully open to receive His grace. As well, when we come allowing God to be the way He is, God has full freedom to relate to us in any way He chooses, knowing we are open to anything and everything He has to give, even if what He has for us will be surprising to us.

            So tuck your goals aside and forget them until you have finished the 12 weeks of meditation lessons. Then have a look and see what was accomplished without you even trying. In other words, any benefit you receive will have come to you by grace. 

EXERCISES 

Day 5 

Repeat the Day 3 meditation. When your meditation is done, notice if you have any judgments about it (it was good, it was boring, it wasn’t much of anything), or if you had any judgments while you were meditating. If so, then take a few extra minutes to look at that judging. Experience your judging, but don’t judge it. Judging our judging is a great temptation. This is especially true for Christians because they know that Jesus said not to judge (Matthew 7:1),[2] and so we label our judgments as bad the moment we spot them. Resist this in meditation. In meditation, let your judging be and get to know it. This doesn’t mean you’re condoning it or saying it’s OK to do. It means that you’re learning to understand it in yourself. One of the values of meditation is that you tend to become more connected with yourself. This is a good thing for your personal health and wholeness. For it to happen, though, you need to make room for it to happen, and you do that by not attacking parts of yourself, but by receiving all of yourself with compassion - even those not so pleasant things about yourself. Ultimately, you will want to bring all parts of yourself into the presence of God within you. There, God can do as He sees fit with the good and the bad that is in you. But that is a little way down the road from where you are right now in your meditation practice. For now, all you do is just have a look at your judgments, if any, about today’s meditation. Look as if you have never looked at judgments before. 

Day 6 

Repeat Day 5, but do the following as well. Over the next day, try to be aware of all the judgments you make through the day. Remember, even labeling something as “good” is a judgment if by that you mean that you like it, or it’s useful to you, or you approve - in other words, if the label “good” has to do with what you think the value of that person or thing or event is to you as opposed to what they are like in themselves.