Thursday, March 29, 2007

Drop it.

I was thinking while I was meditating just now that working with my mind is like walking a dog that keeps stopping to pick stuff up. I'm strolling along, suddenly I feel the leash pull, I look and the dog is holding something in its teeth, a piece of fast food trash, a dead mouse, whatever. I say, "Drop it!" He does. Back to strolling, half a block later the leash pulls again, and on and on.

And if you keep walking the same path, it's often the same damn thing the dog picks up every day. Meditating is just practicing dropping it. Every time. Over and over.

Something I picked up today on my walk was my view of myself as lazy. I guess writing about my schedule put me in mind of it. I've dropped this one a million times, and I keep practicing. When I was a kid, my dad used to tell me I was lazy. "Pick up your feet when you walk!" "Get out of bed!" etc.

I still drag my feet when I walk, and I still sleep in sometimes, but I've come to see these things as aspects of my personality, not moral defects. I'm slow, deliberate, and generally sort of still. Not lazy. But that piece of trash on the sidewalk is still there and still tempts me every time I walk by it.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

That dog analogy is a pretty good one for meditation... just as good and visually evocative as the proverbial "monkey mind". Sigh: I need to start meditating again one of these days. I'd actually like to find the time to go on a retreat, but that probably won't happen before fall.

I like the whole process of just watching where the mind goes during meditation... and then the test is seeing if it drives me crazy or if I can just let it go. It's interesting training the mind...

Thanks for this reminder.