Question
Hi,
How exactly should you feel while youre meditating, should there actually be some sort of different feeling, other than the one of calmness? How do you get rid of thoughts that creep up? And what do you do about itches- you're supposed to be calm and not moving, so should you ignore them, or is there some way to help make them go away?
thanks
Answer
Hi, Andrea.
Fundamentally, meditative time allows us to start to notice what is going on inside as well as outside. It allows us to become, we might say transparent to our inner activity. So, if there is a certain state of body that is taking place, that is what will be felt.
As soon as we try this out, most people find there is a tremendous urge to change what we notice. There's the feeling that I don't want to feel like this. I want to feel a different way and I can do it by doing this or that. It's true that we can affect how we feel. But the reaction happens so fast that we never really deeply feel what it is we are reacting to.
So in sitting down quietly, maybe the first step is to experiment with the possibility of refraining from immediately reacting and rather just staying with the noticing. This urge to react is itself a kind of itch that wants to be scratched immediately.
If you listen and observe very quietly and carefully, you may notice that the moment of waking up to the fact that I've been daydreaming is also the end of the daydream. It happens simultaneously. There is a very brief moment in which the thinking is replaced with simple awareness. And then very quickly usually, the thoughts start up again. The content of the thoughts may be "how can i keep myself from daydreaming?" or "that was pretty cool that i woke up from the daydreaming" but in fact this is thinking again and it won't be noticed until there is another moment of waking up to it. I've noticed myself that the moment of waking up is clear but the moment of falling back into thought is usually impossible to notice.
So what about thoughts creeping up? You can experiment with this for yourself. Really, no one else can do it for any of us in any meaningful way. So watch what happens carefully if you try to guard against thoughts or try to suppress them or concentrate them away. Most of these efforts are tiring and only result in thoughts being suppressed.
If there is enough energy and interest in being simply present, thoughts going through the mind do not disturb that presence much. They don't grab hold and turn into a daydream or if they do, the daydream ends and you stay in presence without immediately falling back into more dreaminess. Perhaps the simplest experiment is just to see if it is possible, over and over and over again, to come back to presence and stay with it gently, without forcing or repressing, without trying to meet anyone's standards or to accomplish anything but just to come back over and over to presence, because it is really our only real life. And then what this presence really is will begin to unfold for you.
As for the physical itching, it is always a good experiment to see if it is possible to just let whatever is itching take care of itself without the usual scratching. Not moving does allow the body and mind to settle deeper into presence. Of course if it turns out to be something that really needs attention, like a bug crawling on you, that will be revealed (though even a bug walking on you doesn't really need attention as long as it's harmless.) You may even notice some deep reactions to such things. These habits of reaction are more clearly seen when they are not immediately called into play. You can give them a brief moment of questioning before scratching.
I will be interested to hear how it goes for you. Does that address your questions? You are very welcome to write back to ask me to clarify something that I didn't say very clearly or to ask some other questions. It can be nice to follow up with these things.
Best,
Jay Cutts
