Thursday, December 31, 2009

If you don’t dig sports, try gardening


Although meditating has a lot in common with practicing and playing a sport, for some folks, meditating may be more akin to gardening. After you plant the seeds, you don’t try to force the seedlings out of the ground, do you? You just water and fertilize, thin and water some more, and eventually the little shoots appear on their own, coaxed into the light by some complex and mysterious mixture of chemistry, genetics, phototropism, and who knows what else.
The point is, you don’t have to know — you just have to do your part and get out of the way! If you get carried away and overwater or disturb the ground prematurely, you only interfere with the process.
In the same way, you need to exert just the right amount of consistent effort in your meditation —don’t overwater or keep scratching the ground searching for signs of progress, but don’t go away for a week and leave your plot unattended, either. Do what you need to do without fixating on the results, and your garden will blossom quite naturally, all by itself.

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