Returning to Meditative Practice

After learning about the horrific traumatizing experience that happened to a great friend of mine, and how they will have to reset and completely start over in order to not be controlled by those memories, I have been reminded of how important it is for me to continue the spiritual path that I began years ago.

Every summer, I stay fairly secluded at my dad's house taking care of the house and plants while my dad is at his summer job.  This summer lifestyle began in my third year of high school, and was the beginning of a life-changing spiritual path of self-studying Buddhism, Taoism, and meditation via the internet and a few books.  This completely changed who I was in the greatest of ways, as I had finally understood the value of what it means to exist, and what it means to truly love every coexisting thing with all of your heart.  My favorite meditation was always this one in which you first imagine the most beautiful place you can, in detail, and then imagine a vision of yourself at your greatest potential walking toward you.  You can then ask your potential self any questions you may have, and then feel in your heart the answers.  The main question that I always asked is, "How can I be like you?", and the answer was always, "Just trust that you are already me, and surrender everything to your heart".  It was the beginning of an amazing transformation in who I was.

This continued the next few summers, as I became even more enamored by what is possible through living a meditative lifestyle.  I had researched about brainwave frequencies (aka. binaural beats), and how I can use them as well as subliminal messages to shape my own thought patterns into more conducive and loving ones.  To this day, I continue to sleep with earphones in my ears every night playing these frequencies and subliminal messages at a very low volume.

I was having so many realizations about life and who/what we truly are beyond any self-concept based stories that we play in our minds, I felt that I had reached the top of the mountain (figuratively speaking).

However, through my years in college I had started taking meditation practices for granted, and felt that I had fallen back to the bottom of the mountain.  My mindset became "I already know what the top of the mountain is like, I don't need to go there again", but what I had forgotten is that being on top of the mountain you live a completely different kind of life and see the world in a completely different way.  I had started taking all of this for granted, and started living a day-to-day life as a college student addicted to facebook and youtube videos, with an extremely mundane mind compared to the potential I had reached in the past.

This summer, I am once again living at my dad's house taking care of the place while he's gone, and I began the summer by just entertaining my mind as much as possible, with exercise, television, anime, video games, and most of all facebook, completely wasting away the potential that summer brings for me with self improvement.

Thanks to hearing about my friend's situation with their recent traumatic experience, I realized that I can also start over; right now.  Today I began researching again Metta meditation (loving-kindness meditation) with videos, writings, and recordings taught by a wonderful Buddhist nun, Ayya Khema.  I plan to rediscover the things I once realized, and perhaps discover more and different things.

For too long I have gone into seeing meditation as a chore that I would procrastinate from - I had forgotten how it can really change your mind.  As the Buddhist teacher Sylvia Boorstein said:
"The mind is like tofu. Tofu doesn't have a very big taste about itself; the taste of the dish you cook with tofu depends on the marinade that the tofu is prepared with. It's what you marinate the mind with that generates the kind of being that you are and the way that you project yourself in the world."

This is an audio recording of Ayya Khema explaining why to meditate.  I highly recommend listening: