Erin and I are spending the week on retreat with Jeff Carreira, and the insights are flowing like water down a hill. My favorite so far is how meditation is like waking from a dream.
What is the dream? To begin, our world assumes that we're all separate selves working towards a goal. Consider when you look at your phone: checking email, stocks, Facebook, Pokemon; who is checking? You. You with your interests and concerns.
You're checking to see who you love and who loves you. How much money you have today. Whether you'll be able to sleep at night after the next presidential election. Or you're just fighting away your boredom. It all strengthens the sense of who you are and what you know about the world.
The rush in real meditation is when all these problems and situations disappear. In fact, you realize they never bugged you in the first place. You were just hypnotized by them. You located yourself in the distractions and you got lost.
When you sit still in meditation, you're not reaching for anything. You let go of the relationships and ideas you lost yourself in. Then you realize: you're free from it all. And that's when things get scary, in a good way.
If meditation means waking up from a dream, and my sense of self was lost in that dream, that means I'm waking up from the dream of myself.
In other words, you're the dream.
The dream is everything you knew about yourself. The dream is that you are the center of the universe. Meditation reveals that there is no center except consciousness itself. Your stories never mattered. And you wake up from the drama of "my life."
Unfettered, you realize that there are many different ways to see your circumstances. Some of those ways have much more power and truth than others. And you can choose how to see it.
If you're interested in deepening your experience and practice of meditation, join me and Erin. Our upcoming meditation teacher training starts in September. Space is limited.
