And tell me, what is it that keeps you alive, that makes your body move? That’s ask my meditation teacher, Guru Kendra, asked me, inviting me to delve into a reflection that turned out to be more intriguing than I had imagined.
While pondering the answer, I must confess that the first thing that crossed my mind was… well, eating, drinking, repeating the cycle, it’s obvious, right? Haha, but no! Then, I let my thoughts take the lead, and my mouth simply couldn’t contain itself. I started talking about the energy of the sun, the heartbeat, and so on. Meanwhile, my teacher watched me with an expression that seemed to say, “Seriously?” Faced with my response, he threw the question at me again: “Yes, but what keeps you alive and moving?”
Now, I invite you to ask yourself the same question before discovering the answer.
Blindness: “Being” or “Not Being.”
This time, I want to share with you a bit of what I learned in this basic meditation course, full of simple yet revealing lessons about meditation. It turns out that it’s not just about closing your eyes and adopting the classic lotus position with crossed legs. Nor should meditation techniques be confused with meditation itself, as techniques are the means that lead us to this state of “being.”
I would like to start by telling you that meditation helps us reach a state of deep relaxation and calm our minds, the kind of relaxation that many of us need. Because the reality is, who hasn’t experienced being so busy throughout the day or, since the crack of dawn, immersed in a thousand pending tasks? And at the end of the day, when we finally stop, our minds keep working full throttle, bringing a myriad of thoughts. It’s like it doesn’t want to shut up! And, of course, there comes stress, anxiety, and other ailments. During the course, I understood that this can be called “blindness” because we become blind to our emotions, actions, and thoughts. We reach the point of forgetting what vital and important things keep us alive and moving.
To my interpretation and according to what I learned, meditation is about “being” and “self-knowledge.” In one of the classes, Guru Kendra said, we should separate “being” from “not being,” and he asked me, what is “not being”? We delved into the topic, and we concluded that it’s all those things that distance us from our being, and this happens, in a way, because of that blindness I mentioned earlier.
Imagine that your body is like a sacred temple, full of light, patience, gratitude, purity, and solutions. This is your “being.” But “not being” is the opposite: impurity, problems, ambition, frustration, anger, fights, etc. All of this comes from our blindness, from not giving ourselves that moment, that breath to internalize, to clear our minds, to listen and feel our bodies. Because how you feel on the inside impacts and vibrates outward. And you know what? The famous phrase “the body speaks what the mouth silences” comes into play. So, summarizing all of this, it’s simply about meditating. And when I say meditating, I don’t mean spending hours, but what led me to write this: being aware of our breath. Because it is in that simple act of breathing that we stay alive and in motion. Truly, this was a great lesson that Guru Kendra gave me among many others in the basic meditation course offered at GN REIKI MEDITATION CENTER, which I highly recommend.
Meditating is about breathing, observing your breath consciously, and one of its objectives is “being.” Once you practice it, I assure you’ll notice the difference.
