Instead of sitting 50 minutes this morning, I prepped a 30 minute and a 15 minute timer on my phone. When the thirty-minute bell came I kicked off the 15 minute timer, lay back over my cushion to stretch my spine and legs a little, stood up and walked, very slowly, attending to the sensations of the floor under my feet, and dangled briefly from my chin-up bar, then walked slowly back to the cushion and resumed the sit, till the second bell. It is challenging to keep any kind of meditative attention while moving, but no more challenging than constantly bringing my awareness back from the fact that my knee hurts and my shin is going numb. I think this is how I’m going to do my longer sits from now on. There’s a not-very-clever machismo involved in white-knuckling through some kinds of physical discomfort, marching under the banner of a mind-body dualism that is no more convincing in eastern metaphysics than it is in western. Being still for a long time is obviously necessary for training the attention, but sitting so long that I can’t easily stand up afterward doesn’t demonstrate my superior spiritual craftsmanship so much as it demonstrates abusing my spiritual tools. At the end of the second sit I could stand up like a hale human being. With variations of these breaks for my legs I could do a whole morning sit, or possibly even a day-long sit: whereas sitting down again soon after a straight fifty minute sit is clearly not going to happen.
2 comments:
I feel this, so much. Often I feel like a lousy meditator, because I cannot sit still; because things hurt; because I get distracted. Or if not those things, then I fall asleep. But at the rabbinic meditation retreat I attended last summer I discovered that brief sitting meditation interspersed with walking meditation is a path I can imagine following. My monkey mind still does all the nonsense it does, but isn't that its purpose, anyway?
Hee! Yes indeed. It's just doing its job.
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