Drop In & Let Go
to trust who you most deeply are, and experience greater calm, joy, love and freedom
At a conference in India with the Dalai Lama, a group of Western Buddhist teachers asked him for the most important message they could bring back home to their meditation students.
“Tell them that they can trust their hearts and awareness to awaken in the midst of all circumstances.”
We long to trust our capacity to handle difficulties, to grow, to love well.
Often we start meditation as a way of connecting with our hearts and awareness, and of living with more confidence.
Yet I’ve seen how for many people, the single biggest challenge to sustaining a meditation practice is the sense of doubt: “I’m not doing this right. I’m not getting it. This isn’t working.”
Students tell me that they can’t control their thinking, that they are not able to maintain open hearted presence.
They wonder why meditation is so hard.
Training our attention is hard.
We’re going against the grain of countless hours lost in thought, unconsciously driven by wants and fears.
It’s as though we’ve spent our lives on a bicycle, pedaling hard to get away from the present moment. We pedal to resist what is happening, we pedal to try to make something happen, we pedal to try to get somewhere else.
The more we feel like something is missing, or something is wrong, the faster we pedal.
Given this conditioning, how can we follow the Dalai Lamas’s advice and trust our heart and awareness?
The practices in meditation (naming our experience, mindfully scanning through the body, or focusing on the breath) help us to pause and open ourselves to the life of the moment.
Yet because we can get so hooked by the need to do something more, the most powerful practice is the intention to let go.
Stop pedaling, relax your habitual “doing” and simply be.
Hindu teacher Swami Satchidananda was once asked by a student if he needed to become a Hindu to go deeply into the practice of yoga.
Satchidananda’s response was, “I am not a Hindu, I am an undo.”
Just so, when meditation frees us, it does not turn us into something better or different, nor does it get us somewhere.
We are not pedaling toward some spiritual achievement.
Rather meditation allows for an undoing of our controlling behavior, an undoing of limiting beliefs, an undoing of habitual physical tensing.
By undoing all the doings, we discover the vast heart and awareness that gives us true refuge in the face of any situation.
This is the gift of meditation practice - we find we can trust who we most deeply are.
If you’d like to experience this for yourself I invite you to listen to this five minute playful drop in and let go pause I recorded for you.
XO, Dani
