My Vipassana Meditation Practice

I thought that I would start blogging more of my personal life that is so intertwined with the art that comes through me. I have always just written about the art and found it hard and choppy to do and I realize that there's a reason why. I find that the easiest thing to do is just write from the heart and speak my absolute truth. I want to write my story and mix my art in there - so that it's a full picture, a more holistic perspective.

I titled this entry regarding my Vipassana meditation practice since that has been a topic of interest and a personal inspiration in my life. I have been meditating since shortly after my first daughter's birth - she was born in August of 2005. After she was born it took me a lot of energy to adjust since I am not the best person to be sleep deprived! I was exhausted and full of uncertainty. But what I did know was that I wanted to be a calm mother. So I began to meditate and continued a more active regimen of yoga as I started to practice Bikram yoga religiously.

Meditating was great, but I found that a lot of times I would be sitting still and thinking and daydreaming rather than focusing on one object as many types of meditation encourage. I recently (a few months ago) learned of a type of meditation called 'Vipassana'. This is the type of meditation that Buddha practiced which had ultimately awoken him to realizing his true essence. I for one am a big fan of the truth! I think that there are so many perspectives to our understanding of life yet there is a truth that is hard for us to see if we internalize and personalize our stories and beliefs - so in order to see this we need to step back from ourselves and our identifications and allow ourselves to be truly objective.

So I began Vipassana and it opened a whole new can of worms...Wow! All of a sudden I had become aware of my insanity by simply observing it. It was unbelievable to me to witness what was happening to my body simply in response to thoughts and feelings. I was starting to recognize that feelings and physical sensations were almost immediately in sync - they actually were in sync, they danced together. I began to recognize my reactions and found that my identification with certain thoughts convinced me that those thoughts weren't there and that they were reality. weird? crazy! I am starting to understand more of what Eckhart Tolle says in his books.

So at first it was really hard for me to do, but I liken it to having a lot of junk to sort through in your house. It sucks to go through but you feel so much clearer and your home functions much easier as a result. What I found was compassion for myself and then compassion for others. A realization that we all struggle to find peace in our worlds, we all have turbulence and when I see people being miserable to the world, I know that they are reflecting their ten times worse misery in their own worlds.

I want to note that what got me turned on to this meditation was hearing Jenny Phillips on Oprah's soul series. She was a vipassana meditation teacher who began teaching in prisons and found incredible effects on the inmates who practiced this type of meditation. I then revisited a book that I bought years ago in Amsterdam called 'Mindfulness in Plain English' by Henepola Gunaratana. I remember the book being hard to read at the time that I bought it (before my first daughter was conceived) and now totally getting something from it. So if anyone is looking to learn to meditate I highly recommend this book.

So with that, I would like to share this beautiful qoute:

"We convince by our presence"

-Walt Whitman