Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
On Meditation And Other Training Exercises
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2015 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
Last night, as I do most Wednesday nights, I went to my local mindfulness meditation group. It was a very distracted meditation for me, and as we ended, a voice in me judged, failure.
And I internally replied to that voice, saying, hold on, define your terms. If this is failure, what would success be?
And I thought of an analogy. When we jump rope to exercise, we jump, over and over again. We know that at the end of each jump we will fall back down to earth, because that's how gravity is. The aim is not to jump, each time, in the hopes that this time we'll take off into space, as though this time we will escape gravity. Jumping rope is a training activity. The aim is to strengthen the muscles of the legs by using the unbending force of gravity. We practice pushing off against it, and over time our legs get better and better at letting us move around.
Minds have thoughts. That's what they do. The distractions you will always have with you. Meditation and prayer help me get better at working with them, using them, instead of having them in charge of me.
