It feels different to be outside than to be inside. Knowing this distinction seems so basic to consciousness that doctors might ask patients coming out of a coma this question: “Do you know where you are right now? Are you inside or outside?”
And yet we forget. We forget we have been given bodies and hearts. We forget we have been given capacities to sense and feel. We forget that life is offering itself to us. This why it is important to put ourselves in different circumstances—to go outside in nature, or to meditate–so that we can experience ourselves as more than a brain on a stick. Meditating means remembering that we are not just a story in our head, urgent and dire as that story may seem. We are alive and part of a much greater story.
Sitting down to meditate with others is a quietly radical act. Even if we don’t consciously know what we are doing, something inside seeks to re-root ourselves in life, even if just for a moment. We want to remember the essential truth of our lives. We want to remember how it feels to be here, alive on the earth.
Even if nothing great seems to be happening, sitting down to be still, making the effort, helps us cultivate a different kind of inner intention towards ourselves. It helps us let go of our endless battle with reality, trying to fix ourselves and gain something, and avoid pain. When we let ourselves stop and be still, we remember that we are part of a greater story.
Henry David Thoreau:“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.”. People debate about how cut off from civilization he really was in his tiny cabin at Walden Pond. Someone once posted on Parabola social media that Thoreau’s mother did his laundry. He also had visitors. But his intention was true. He wanted to move from the surface to the depths of life, not to waste his brief time on earth“living what was not life.”
Meditation is a way of manifesting this intention in the middle of an ordinary life. Even only for a few moments every day, we can sit down and be still, or walk outside, creating a clearing in which we can remember that we are more than we think we are. We really do contain multitudes.
Tracy Cochran 