A real holiday
A famous saying in anonymous alcoholics is: “Wherever you go, you are there.” The fact that you cannot just leave your addiction to another city, because you take your thoughts where you go everywhere, including all mechanisms that create addiction in the first place. It is the same if you try to take a regular vacation to relax. Sometimes lying at the swimming pool gives you temporary lighting of stress, but you soon notice that you are worried and ruminating about the usual things you worry.
So how can we escape ourselves and really have a holiday that offers a delay of our normal daily worries, stress and thinking? Meditation is the way you can take a real holiday every day. If you don’t, you can easily ‘burn out’ the endless ‘heat’ of thinking.
It is merged or held on thoughts that we have to take a break. Our mind is like an ocean and we usually live on the surface where there are always waves and restlessness, but just below the surface there is a quiet place where the waves don’t touch. Dive a little deeper and you can enter a profound silence where the unrest of the surface is only a farthest dot.
Detachment of thoughts is not the end of meditation, but it is certainly the beginning. The idea of meditation is not to stop thinking, it is to stop being controlled by thinking. Releasing thoughts and becoming the silent witness of a deep soothing place of pure observation. As a Zen master Shunryu Suzuki advises.
“Let your front door and your back door open. Let your thoughts come and go. Just don’t serve them.”
Giving space and freedom of thought gives you a holiday of the usual emotions that get caught up in thinking. A real holiday must be deeply relaxing and rejuvenating, what is exactly what meditation is.
As meditation-master Arjahn Chah says:
“If you let go a little, you will have a little peace. If you let go a lot, you will have a lot of peace. If you let go completely, you are free.”
A vacation that heals
“Meditation is no way to stop your mind. It is a way to enter the silence that is already there – buried among the 50,000 thoughts that the average person thinks every day”
Zen Masters call it the hidden treasure house, some simply call it inner peace and in Buddhism it is called the nature of Buddha. Whatever you mention, it is a holiday resort that is always open to wait until you enjoy your real peace and relaxation, a real holiday, a holiday for your mind that also heals the body.
Written by Chad Foreman