I was recently going through my old writings and I discovered something that I had written several years before. After I reread the piece, I wondered if it might be of help to other people, who are also on the Meditation journey and who occasionally find the process raising doubts?
I had returned to this meditation after an absence of almost three years, mostly to please my wife Sally, who had previously restarted her meditation as well. I really wasn’t 100% convinced however, that I needed it. I felt confident that it would be very easy to pass level one, as I had already done so previously.
At first the discarding of my false perceptions of the world seemed to progress very smoothly but then the many doubts and negative feelings toward the meditation began to surface. These were the reasons why I had actually discontinued the meditation before and I found myself arguing and questioning every aspect of the method.
The helpers at the centre were very patient with my complaints. After a considerable time of grumbling, Helen one of the helpers from the Sydney Centre suggested that I write down all of my negative thoughts about the meditation and spend some time in meditation on each of my complaints.
After two more weeks of meditation I took my list out of the draw where it had been and I was horrified at the level of negativity my words contained. I could really recognize on the page in front of me, the level of pain and suffering I had been putting myself through.
From that point on, the more I meditated the more I could clearly recognise, that the suffering I had put myself through in the past, was the result of my false perceptions and emotional attachments. I could see that it was truly a picture world, I had stored over many years in my mind.
The more I began to discard the more my mind was set free from the burdens of the past.
Angela (now a helper at the Perth centre), towards the end of level one, helped me to understand the importance of letting go of my intellectualisation and helped me to approach my meditation from a position of experiencing the meditation rather than judging it, or making it into another false experience or set of pictures that would be stored away in my mind.