Meditation: Polishing The Cup
If you are irritated by every rub, how will you ever get polished? Rumi
Rubbing away our accumulated tarnish is ultimately an act of love. And yet, in the beginning, it feels a lot like work. The false selves that we create often have very specific purposes which usually are in service of the ego. They are not bad or evil per se. Instead, they are our attempts to adapt to our culture. To “win friends and influence people.” And, to protect our true selves from the exposure that could result in disappointment, hurt, humiliation, being misunderstood or maligned, passed over or neglected.
And so, the innocent cover up begins.
And, it works until it doesn’t. At some point we begin to feel inauthentic. Not all that we are capable of being. Out of touch with our deepest joy, direction, and purpose. Like your foot when it has been asleep and begins to awaken, there is strange sensation and uncomfortable feeling until the blood flow is fully restored and the foot returns to its rightful self.
These strange sensations are the harbingers of growth begging to happen. The true self is always at our core seeking expression.
Michelangelo, when asked to explain the secret of his brilliant sculpturing said, “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” He also said, “If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful.”
Thankfully, he did the work he was called to do. He released the angel and it was wonderful. Just like you. And, hopefully, just like me.
The true self is like the angel in the marble. Our task is to set it free. And, our mastery requires a lot of work.
As the liberating sculptors of our own true selves, we have many tools at our disposal. Meditation is one such tool.
The hardest part of meditation is getting started. Most of us feel quite singular in our belief that, “I cannot meditate. My mind is too active and goes in too many directions.” This is, actually, a universal experience. The art of meditation is the learned and practiced skill of continually training our attention back and back and back again to a point of focus.
In so doing, we gradually strengthen our capacities for concentration and awareness. Meditation itself is actually “a form of physical and mental exercise that serves to strengthen the natural ability to bring moment-by-moment awareness to our lives.” (Professor Mark Muesse, Rhodes College) It can then become an instrument used in the cultivation of mindfulness, contemplative practice, stress reduction, or simply the heightened ability to pay attention to what we are reading, hearing, or saying.
When we direct meditation towards our inner growth, it becomes the chisel with which we gradually chip away the marble covering our truest selves. In keeping with the metaphors of our previous post, we clean our rusted trowels and engine parts, repair our dilapidated buildings. We polish our cups, rubbing the tarnish away, revealing the silver beneath.
Next post, I will share with you my early experience with meditation, delightfully experienced before I had a clue what it was all about. I do so in hopes that, if you are curious about beginning, you will know you are not alone in it.
Until then, may we all be about the business of Practicing Peace on Purpose.
