New Mantras

I feel like I’m a lifetime away from Bangkok, and light years away from America. Time dissolves and slows down regularly. I attempt to give a glimpse through these stories but nothing will ever capture the fleeting feeling and emotions of what makes my time special. Perhaps I can never define it, I can just snap a small portion of it thanks to this technology. I can only wish you get to experience the warmth, confusion and challenge of what I’m doing. And maybe that’s precisely it, I don’t know what I’m doing at all but I find myself saying yes to things more than I ever. It’s like having the spiciest soup on the hottest day - you feel it all over, you feel it within — you feel the fire burn inside you and it makes you feel more alive — and you shit it out and do it again.

I really want to tell you about my new found mantra i discovered during my meditation retreat, the monk and teacher who I spoke to which provided some guidance before attending, cautioning me to check out a one day retreat before diving into something too extreme and gave me some guidance for moving through the middle path. I’m not a monk, nor will I ever be one. There are forest monks, city monks and each have to adapt to their surroundings and in that, I should adapt to my surroundings as well, not remove myself — this was a useful lesson which has enabled me to open up, to continue to enjoy myself, my surroundings and people whom I surround myself with.

Back to the mantra, which is still developing, it’s simple really — it’s combined with normal conscious breathing mediation techniques, allowing myself to focus on the present only; not the past or future.

My mantra thus far, is simply: “pain” and I repeat it to myself when things get a bit uncomfortable in the sitting position. Alternating between breathing and pain.

Why “pain”? To me, it’s simply because that too often, we (I) am looking to avoid pain. We don’t want to think about it, we want to do everything we can to escape it but the process of focusing on the pain of being uncomfortable you can move through pain and understand this level of pain doesn’t compare to the real pain you would feel from more complex emotions, and physical problems. It allows me to stay in the moment, readjust, and let things move through me more than dwell on them.

With that said maybe I don’t understand true pain.