Stillness in Movement, or just stillness

On a few occasions, I have tried to get into meditation. You know, sitting in a comfortable position, surrounded by soft lights and quiet, trying to empty the mind and find the still place at the center of my being. But usually what I get is an experience of how much my mind jumps all over the place and refuses to be still.

I know meditation is supposed to be good for me. I also know brussel sprouts are good for me, but at least I can grill those in olive oil and garlic (maybe even add some bacon if I am feeling particularly naughty) and come up with something mouth-wateringly tasty. The noise coming from my mind when I am sitting still is less like garlic and olive oil, and more like sand in the underpants. It just seems to get in the way of me enjoying the quiet like I would want to.


I was encouraged a while back when I read about Tibetan Buddhist meditation, where you get to treat the images that come into your mind not as obstacles, but friends. Follow the labyrinthine path your mind wants to take, and when it has finally run out of gas, then you can really experience the peace, before, like a 5 year old, your mind catches its breath and starts darting all over the place again. Not bad, but still not the wonderous experience of meditation, the revivifying blast of me-as-mountain that I'd like to know.


Of course, the solution was right in front of me, which is why I didn't see it - it's tattooed on my forehead, and I wasn't looking in the mirror. I didn't waste all those years (from 1986 to 1999, basically) singing Gregorian chant weekly. We learned that listening while singing, as daunting as it can be to try to do those things simultaneously, can really settle the mind, transform experience, all that kind of good stuff. Yes, there's still that idea of the workings of the mind as distraction that I have a hard time with. I just can't help feeling that there is a good reason that I think what I think, even if there is a hierarchy and there are times when I would like to set aside the nagging suspicion that I forgot to buy bread at the store to focus on more important and/or more pressing concerns. Cleaning house doesn't necessarily mean throwing out all the furniture to get to the dust and the cobwebs.


So here I am now thankfully in a new chant choir, singing mass once a week. Now granted I am the only singer who is aware of what I am trying to do. I have no idea what the motivation is of any of the other guys with which I am singing. But for me the most important point of the whole thing is listening. Not that I do that very often. In fact, part of my motivation for writing this is to remind myself to remember to listen more frequently during the mass. So far I have been tied up in making sure I sing the right notes, and keep in mind where the next piece of music is in the book.


But things are getting better. Every so often I get the feeling that, hey, I do know how to do this, don't I? I start to relax just for a moment. I look at Charlie, the director, and try to hear the other voices in relation to my own. All the things I learned to do more than 20 years ago when I first learned to sing chant. And then the moment is lost and I go back to struggling. I trust that the more I listen, the faster I will start to get back my chant "chops." And then I will be not a chant follower, someone trying desperately to keep up - I willl be a leader, capable of leading others and capable of being sensitive to others and myself.


In the meantime, if I can make some progress in my physical therapy, I may, before the summer is over, get to take up again one of my other favorite methods for getting to that quiet place: in-line skating. Perhaps because it works the core so well (you know, the lower back and stomach muscles, in some circles the center of our being), skating, especially when I do it alone, is a tremendously "centering" experience. There is so much rhythm to the strides as I move, left, right, that it sometimes feels like I am not moving at all - an analogy to the mind moving and remaining still. It is at the most energetic moments of skating fast with sweat rolling down my face, the sound of the wind whistling through my ears, my limbs darting back and forth, that I remember the lesson of this exercise.

While some may search for stillness by eliminating everything that moves except for maybe the breath, for me, the stillness makes itself most indelibly felt in concert with movement. In other words, stillness is part of all that is moving, and conversely, movement if it is harmonious and free is a part of the meditation.