Motivation and Willingness
I was forty when I first started meditating regularly and getting seriously curious about awareness and presence. Before that, I had dabbled in meditation from time to time, and had done some reading about it, but it wasn’t a regular interest. I had my own small but busy company, and moved fast, talked fast, and thought fast.
My sons were four and one at the time. It became very clear to me that I was having trouble slowing down enough mentally and emotionally to genuinely connect with them. I could see that when I was “right there” the quality of our interactions and of my intimacy with them was very high. But those times were too infrequent. More often, the pressure of work, running a household, helping a sick parent, or other demands would leave my mind spinning and only half-there when I played or talked with the kids.
As well, I found that my heart ached when I saw the news on TV or heard of friends’ misfortunes. Yet, there is so little we can do compared to the amount of suffering out there. Do we just push it away and harden our hearts, not taking it in so it doesn’t overwhelm us? I wanted to find a way to care without being swamped with pain. How does one stay present with the world as it is, without getting crushed?
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If a person is just casually interested in noticing the story aspect of our thinking, movitivation might not be a concern. But actually developing the ongoing habit of seeing our storylines can at times bring us pain. It’s challenging to be willing to see what is behind our lifelong ways of thinking, reacting, and protecting ourselves. You might hit periods of time when it hardly seems worth it – we see aspects of ourselves and our lives that we might prefer not to have seen. We open up emotions we had previously been ignoring or repressing. We might feel some vulnerability and uncertainty. There is a much greater aliveness and presence, but aliveness can bring intensity and relating to the energy of brilliance and pain that is in every moment.
It helps to have a reason that is clear in our minds about why we want to become more aware, more present, more alive, more in touch with our natural wisdom. Otherwise, it’s easy to turn away when the going gets rough.
Some of the more powerful reasons people have include
>>>Developing some wisdom about life, to develop balance, aliveness and peace of mind
>>>Being more ‘there’ for one’s children, being wiser and kinder, and more alive; and being a better role model for fully living life
>>>Reducing stressful patterns for health or enjoyment reasons.
>>>Feeling in pain about the state of the world, with its wars, environmental problems, hunger, and aggression, some believe that the most important individual contribution we can make to our fellow beings is to develop awareness, wisdom and compassion – and believe that it spreads like ripples in a pond
My motivation changed over the years. Though I still value the ways in which more presence has brought me closer to my kids, I now feel in my bones that most of the avoidable suffering in the world is because of our tendency to push away reality. As I’m often found saying in a talk, “Would we really let 30,000 babies die every day from starvation if we weren’t able to put that out of our minds? If we were really present with that, we would want to do something about it.”
The same is true of our reactive patterns that hurt others, whether in small or large ways. I believe that child abuse, war, prejudice, environmental disaster and other ills of the world can be directly connected back to our individual and collective inability to be present with “what is”. For me, that is the most powerful motivation to ‘do my share’ to become more present, and to do what I can to help others as well.
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Over time I’ve seen people take the ideas in this section and apply them to their lives. The people who seemed to transform the most, towards more connection and awareness, had one thing in common: a willingness to really see what was happening in their minds. The petty judgments, the manipulations, the hopes, the fears, the anxiety, the secret wishes, the lust, the frustration, and on and on – it’s just human, and it happens in all of our minds.
I remember how horrified and ashamed one of my friends was about thoughts that had gone through her mind. She had taken a leave from her job to take care of her dying mother, and her mother was lingering longer than anyone had expected. She confessed to me that all alone in a city not her home, trapped all day and night taking care of her dying mother, she had thoughts of smothering her with a pillow. She told me these thoughts months after her mother died, and I could see they were eating her alive.
Fortunately I had a little anecdote I could share. When my stepfather was dying, he also lingered at least a couple of weeks longer than expected. He was dying at home, and all his kids had flown from their families, jobs and lives to be with him at the end for what they expected to be a few days at most. But as two weeks dragged into three and then four, with my stepdad unconscious in the living room, there was definitely some black humour, including talk of ‘accidentally’ standing on the oxygen line. But I feel he wouldn’t have minded -- almost his last words, as he woke up one day briefly near the end and struggled for breath, was an attempt at humour: “Am I still alive? Someone hit me with a two-by-four, for goodness sake!”
My friend was so incredibly relieved to hear what happened in my family. She felt that she and she alone had those kinds of thoughts. So rest assured, whatever you see in your own mind, is probably happening in some similar way with most other people – they just don’t usually share it, so we don’t realize. Your willingness to see the full range of thought that comes up in your very human mind, and see it clearly, is the key to aliveness and awareness and connection with others.
