Using the Tool of Meditation
I want to speak about meditation and its job. I would like to compare the person who practices meditation to a master swordsman. When you first decide to be a swordsman there is a reason. Maybe you need to protect yourself or maybe your father wants you to be one or maybe you just have a love for it. So you start training lessons. It’s not that you could not hurt someone or protect yourself the first day you pick up the sword, it is more that you’re clumsy at first, unskilled, maybe working harder than you need to.
As time passes you become more skilled and you start learning how to use every part of the sword and you start learning tricks with the sword to give you the upper hand over your opponent. As you train even longer the sword becomes an extension of yourself, part of you. You learn to flow with your opponent and you learn to use your sword as a tool.
Meditation is the same. The first day you try it, you have ideas, goals, thoughts about who you are or what you think meditation is. This does not mean that the first day you tried you didn’t meditate, it means you were just clumsy at it. But as you put more time into it you start observing your thoughts and you learn to stop reacting to situations and start creating or opening up to how you want the situations that come up to be resolved.
As time passes you start seeing meditation move off of your cushion and into your everyday life. You feel yourself free of thoughts and you are living more in the present moment. Stories do not have the same emotional attraction they once had. The chatter of the mind starts to be just background noise and you become skilled in the silence.
Then you start learning to flow. You start learning to become the observer. Meditation becomes your tool. You start understanding how the ego works and how the chatter of the mind is endless. You learn that you do not have to attach to anything and you can sit in the center of any emotion, belief or story you might have and feel safe. You have control of what you want to believe or create in your life now. You start using your tool of meditation in every part of your life. It becomes you and you become it.
Real Deal Meditation 