How quick our minds are! I didn't know this until recently. About three months ago I started doing a very simple breathing meditation. It appealed to me because it is presented as secular and scientific, and it allows you to approach it with no preconceptions and no expectations. You don't have to feel like a failure for not achieving nirvana.
You simply sit for five minutes and breathe, being aware of your breath in, breath out. In order to make it my own, I do two things: first, I incorporate the "stacking" of the vertebrae as described in "8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back." What better time to work on my posture than when I am sitting there doing nothing anyway, right?
The other thing I do is count my breaths, one to ten, then start over. This happens in some faraway part of my brain, one in, one out, two in, two out, while the rest of my mind is free to focus on the actual breaths.
Well, you know how it is. One-in, one-out, what's for breakfast? Did I finish that peach crisp last night? The peaches at the market were great this week but they're gone now and that's the end of the peaches and I didn't freeze any this year because I never seem to use my frozen peaches because I smoothies are too cold to drink in winter but maybe I should have because I'll really miss peaches-–and then I'm at two-in, two-out. I resolve to make it to ten in, ten out without drifting off into will I take a walk today? What's the weather? Maybe I can take one later but I know I won't because I get bored walking on my own I wonder if Adri would like to walk in the afternoon but it might be too hot Dean hates the heat. And I find myself at three-in, three-out.
My point is this: I have discovered that my mind produces hundreds of inconsequential thoughts in mere nano-seconds. I know my counting is correct—and I am having to acknowledge that the mind flits furiously in the space of a single breath. If I weren't counting, way in the back of my brain, I would never have realized how fast (and involuntarily) the thoughts run. I would have supposed that I'd been thinking for three or four minutes here—but now I realize that it's been only the space of a breath, or even half a breath.
Pema Chodron said something about how vigorously our minds try to keep us from being with who we are—and I finally have incontrovertible proof of this. One-in. One-out.
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