Why Meditate? Part 3

Meditation helps me to see what's really going on; it helps me to find forgiveness for myself and for others; it helps me to head off pain.  I still feel pain, for sure, if anything I feel my emotions more and am more aware of what is going on within myself, but I don't seem to get swamped by those emotions if I meditate; I am more able to observe them, come to understand them and learn from them.  Everything that we feel has something to teach us: I choose feeling over being numb and I choose knowing over wandering blindly through life wondering why nothing seems to feel right and why my soul is not happy.  I know, deep in my heart, that if I stay with this practice everything will be fine; no doubt there will be sadness and pain alongside the happiness, but still, everything will be fine.  Meditation is a gentle meeting with the divinity inside myself: it touches me, and I touch it.  And if it's in me, then it's in everyone.

I think of my teachers often and with love and gratitude.  I know that they already know all of this and more, but that they are not going to make me hurry; they'll just love and smile at me as I stumble along finding my own way; they know that their own teachers offered them this same benevolent patience, gave them this same loving kindness as they too found their own unique path - the only path you can ever take, for nobody else's will do.

You only have to ask what you are here for; you only have to keep asking; you only have to be awake; you only have to meet yourself, in honesty, every day.  That's all you do.  And it all comes to you in its own good time and it comes in beauty.

Namaste

'It did not really matter what we expected from life,

but rather what life expected from us.'

Victor Frankl