Recently I had the opportunity to step out of my mental comfort zone & I reflected that it’s not something that I do voluntarily , and yet when I accept the offer a new door opens.
A door that I hadn’t even realised was there.
It was a zoom presentation with a slide show - bread and butter for many people but I had never owned a laptop till a few months ago.
When the pandemic started and people began to offer online sessions in our Meditation, it didn't seem relevant to me. The world of computers was a foreign one, my skills negligible.
Nevertheless some other meditators kept offering to help me so I couldn’t avoid knowing that it must be just my own mind that was creating the barrier. As I reflected I saw that at almost 70 yrs old I resisted being a rank beginner and I was afraid that I might actually be incapable of acquiring these skills.
I was being intimidated by my own mind (pride) - nothing real, no substance.
So with a couple of willing coaches I put my nose to the computer grindstone -it really felt like that initially - very self centred- my struggle - the hero reluctantly enduring!
Gradually my perspective changed and I saw that the real heroes were my coaches with their inexhaustible patience, encouraging and challenging me by turns. I felt humble and grateful.
I have come to see that to be a beginner at my age is a happy thing, full of possibility.
Our minds deceive us, continually convincing us that the thing we don’t want to do is bad for us, that our comfort zone is sacrosanct. Instead of investigating the ‘threat’ (meditation) we turn up the volume of that bullying voice and take notes.
Meditation is reflecting, taking a good hard look to see what lies beneath - how it really is - not how I think it should or shouldn’t be - and letting go of it.
True reflection reveals that our ‘comfort zone’ is just a stale, ancient pattern that deadens possibility, maintained by force of habit, by lack of investigation.
When you harness your mind, instead of it harnessing you, which is what this meditation is -self mastery - there is nothing you cannot achieve, even things you hadn’t dared to dream.
Helen R. Sydney, Australia