The whirlwind

It’s astonishing how many things are going on in our minds. It seems like a whirlwind, a never-ending cycle of thoughts and images and stories and histories and plans and delusions and faces and feelings. And we can assume it’s going on pretty much all the time, only really noticed, ironically, when we try to sit and meditate.

In that sense, meditation can be exhausting, but perhaps that is just the price of awareness. If a cowboy has to tame a wild horse, he first has to get on the wild horse, which will of course try to throw him by bucking and jumping and running – all things which are in the nature of the horse, and which the cowboy is aware of but not experiencing until he gets on and tries to hang on.

In my meditation this morning I was in the mountains, in an imagined future, in a war, in love, in various places I have actually been, and not. At just a couple of moments I was sitting in my chair, facing my little altar with the candle and the painting and the prayer flags, and watching my breath. But then I would typically think to myself, “Oh yes, I’m doing well now,” and that thought would take over, and off I would go again, perhaps on a train ride or for a bit of flying through the clouds.

I am lost in distraction, I tell myself. I am trying. I am coming back to my breath. I am noticing how many seconds long it is. I am trying to extend each in-breath and out-breath one second longer, like the book said to do. I am forgiving myself for wandering off. I am breathing. I am forgiving. I am trying. I am forgiving.