~ Quote by Arvis Joen Justi
Arvis Joen Justi was Adyashanti’s Zen teacher. This was her response to his struggle with meditation and his attempt to calm his mind, control his thoughts, and trying to be still.
According to Adyashanti, “That really struck me. At that moment I realized I had been viewing meditation as a battle with my mind. I was trying to control my mind, to pacify my mind, to try to get my mind to be quiet."
Suddenly I thought, “My goodness, forever is an awfully long time. I must come up with a whole different way of looking at this.” If continuing this way meant I was going to be at war with my mind indefinitely, I needed to find a way not to be at war with my mind. Without even knowing it I started to investigate, in a quiet and very deep way, what it would be like not to be at war with my own mind, with what I felt, with my whole human experience.
Excerpt From Adyashanti's book "True Meditation: Discover the Freedom of Pure Awareness"
I started to meditate in a different way. I let go of the idea of what meditation was supposed to be. My mind had had a lot of ideas about meditation. It was supposed to be peaceful; I was supposed to feel a particular way, mostly calm. Meditation was supposed to lead me into some deep state of being. But because I could not master the technique of meditation as it was being taught to me, I had to discover a different way of meditating, one that wasn’t oriented around a technique. So I would sit down and let my experience simply be, in a very deep way. I started to let go of trying to control my experience. That became the beginning of discovering for myself what True Meditation is. From that point on, that shift – moving from trying to perfect a technique or discipline to actually letting go of technique and discipline – started to inform the way I engage in meditation.
~by Adyashanti - book: True Meditation: Discover the Freedom of Pure Awareness
Image: Zen by zenonline at Foter.com
