But of course this is impossible when you are new, and so J's mind filled with thoughts of how difficult it is to sit. She felt tension that she'd not even noticed in her shoulders and back. She felt thirst. She felt weariness. It was alternately a struggle to resist movement and to withstand the urge to sleep. After 25 minutes, a bell rang, signalling the end of the first seated meditation. J rose with the group and began to walk around the room, following the others who knew the path. This too was a challenge. They walked through the hallway of the old house and into the kitchen, back into the large meditation/living room and around again. It was tempting to look about rather than to focus on the placement of each foot. J's curious eyes took in the items on the counter of the kitchen, the small table, the many statues and wall hangings, the various heights and shapes of the others in the room, the colour of their socks.
The walk ended at the sound of another bell and they returned to their seats for the second round of meditation. J felt a certain dread as she seated herself again. Would this sit feel longer than the first? Would she succumb to the sleep that threatened to pull her under? Would her thoughts highjack her out of her being entirely?
And the thoughts did come. And one of them was fairly enlightening. What she will do with it is another matter. The thought was this: we are all of us, in this high-speed western world, afraid of the passage of time. This is what makes just sitting so difficult. How can you not think about the fact that time is passing and you are not doing anything to distract yourself from it? Anything would be better than sitting in awareness of the overwhelming reality of time. And this explains why we can allow ourselves to compulsively check our e-mail, busy ourselves with make-work projects, lose ourselves in the comforts of television or youtube or facebook or whatever electronic teat you've latched onto. And this too explains why a child, like E, who has no concept of the passage of time can be so fully and blissfully engaged in an activity, to move freely from one to the next, to focus or fall into deep sleep, to wake with enviable energy and simply be a part of the world without worrying about filling time or fleeing from it. We teach a fear of time and once we're adults we have a sense of its pressure that is entirely of our own making. And the only way to avoid this self-entrapment is to sit and face time, to simply be.
This is Big mind - Little mind in action. Big mind, daishin, that space we each carry and can train ourselves to connect with, tells us that time is, it simply is, and that we are a part of it. Little mind tells us time is something we must manage, control, attempt to fight or flee. Little mind is what we've been taught and what we must let go of in order to surrender ourselves, to be in harmony with time. But Little mind, like the little boy who demands and insists and throws tempers and wins his way, is tricky to ignore. We must cultivate infinite patience. We don't really have a choice, do we?
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