Escaping meditation martyrdom
There are those who think you must maintain rigid postures — for extended periods of time — through discomfort, through pain, for effective meditation.
I’m not one of those.
That is for people who feel they must earn their way to grace. That is for marathoners who enjoy going through pain to obtain a result. That is for workaholics who have made meditation their new work.
No — for me — for others — it is what feels right and comfortable that gets you there. You can become a meditation martyr if you wish — or if you need hardship to gain your entrance — but it is unnecessary. So unnecessary.
You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
— Franz Kafka
I can guarantee you that this often sickly aesthete from turn-of-the-20th-century Prague was not sitting rigor mortis rigid, joints at hard angles, when immersed in the meditative reverie of which he writes.
Some of humankind’s most solitary mystics never went near a yoga pose.
If you want to get gassy and giggly as your preamble to the meditative moment — do it! So be it! If you want to sit comfortably in a wingback chair — go for it. It is your way. There is no other way than your way.
Don’t let imposed ideas from others keep you from the joys of elongated silence. Find your own way into the sublime . . . it is your country to claim. Stillness throws its border gates wide open to all —
There is no other way than your way.
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