HOW TO MEDITATE
Letting Go Of Expectations, part 2
By Tergar Meditation Community • 3 min read
By Tergar Meditation Community • 3 min read
The unconscious desire to create constancy is a very human trait. At the beginning of any endeavor, we instinctively create a standard for ourselves, checking and calculating as we go along in an attempt to match it. For example, let’s say you’ve resolved to start bringing your lunch to work, instead of buying take-out on your break. For the first few weeks, you feel pretty good about the homemade sandwiches you’re bringing, so wholesome and tasty, and cheaper too. Then one day you bring one that misses delicious by a mile — soggy on one side, burnt on the other. Ugh, tomorrow you’ll get back on track! But the next day, you end up buying some greasy and overpriced takeout on your break. Now you feel regret, you feel annoyed with yourself. Everybody does this. We get aspirational, aim to be consistent, and then feel lousy when we diverge from our self-created goal.
When we have committed to the path of meditation, we tend to impose this desire for consistency on that, too, so should we experience any sort of dip in our meditation practice, we feel uncomfortable, dissatisfied, insecure — all those bugaboos start vying for our attention. But this habit of seeking consistency really has no place in a meditation practice. Try to free yourself from any expectation that anything about your practice is going to remain perfectly steady, or that you’ll be able to replicate any experiences you might have. Just be.
In just being, you can’t accidentally mess your meditation up, or escape from it, or sabotage it. Even if you try to annihilate it, if you’re just being, you’ll only enter meditation even more profoundly. So let go, and whatever comes up, let it be. Whether it’s good or bad, whether you’re feeling happy or unhappy, it’s all happening within awareness. Everything is a manifestation of awareness. All experiences are the waves in that ocean of awareness.
“The simple awareness that is the essence of natural mind is too close to recognize. It’s there when we wake up in the morning, wherever we go throughout the day, when we eat, and when we get ready to go to bed.”
– Mingyur Rinpoche –
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Tergar Meditation Community supports individuals, practice groups, and meditation communities around the world in learning to live with awareness, compassion, and wisdom. Grounded in the Tibetan Buddhist lineage of our guiding teacher, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, our online and in-person programs are accessible to people of all cultures and faiths, and support a lifelong path toward the application of these principles in everyday life.
When we sit on the cushion and all the circumstances are good, plus the environment is cooperating, then we have some experience of meditation. But when we get off the cushion and move into everyday life, then sometimes — even though we know that, theoretically, we can practice daily meditation anywhere, anytime — we forget what that really means.
If you’re reading this, you’ve certainly received at least a few teachings that inspired you to meditate. But for some of us, there’s just one catch: we somehow can’t get around to actually doing it. “Oh my, the day went by so fast! Well, tomorrow, I’ll definitely make time to meditate.” Tomorrow comes and goes, and meditation gets put off until the next day . . . and the next.
If you have more than one person in a room, you’ve automatically got more than one set of opinions and ideas there, too. And, generally speaking, you’re in a room full of folks secretly thinking that their ideas are best of the lot.
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