It is not easy to explain why I meditate. It seems easier to explain why I like to be in my garden than to explain why I like to plop down on the floor and shut my eyes for ten or fifteen minutes.
For me, it is a time to really be connected. More than anything else, I feel connected to my body. It is more than just being aware of my body. I know that I am aware. It is an intimacy I never felt before I took the time to sit and enter intensely into paying attention.
Once I have plunged into being connected, I begin to feel part of a vast void. Strangely, that void has all the feeling of being everything, and I am connected to it. It is a place I get to go a couple times a day. I am very relaxed and very alert.
Meditation for me is a time to learn what it feels like to be connected to my body and connected to that vast void. I am at home, and the contentment is full of energy.
It is an experience that doesn’t simply show up. I have to invite it. When I meditate, I learn how to invite the experience more easily by doing it again and again. Ah, this is what it is like.
What I learn in mediation follows me through the day. Any time I pause and remember what it feels like to be connected, that same feeling of being connected returns. My body and mind simply position themselves to be open to whatever is around me. I have a relaxed experience of being connected.
It could be a quick touch of the door frame as I pass it. The door frame and I are instantly connected. It could be watching the people getting on the bus. Each of them suddenly becomes more than an object of awareness. I know them as someone I am connected to.
When I remember to pause when eating, the food I am putting into my mouth becomes an experience of intimacy. Taste and texture are being known. I am connected with the food by more than texture and taste. I experience it with my whole body. We are connected.
Being connected doesn’t make an awareness itself more pleasant. The bathroom floor is still chilly, the bus people are still noisy and rude, the food is too bland or too spicy. However, the intimacy itself, the way I experience the awareness can usually be enjoyable. Something about accepting and being intimate with the way things are becomes a source of enjoyment and contentment.
Meditation teaches me how to be connected. Even when it is difficult, meditation is usually a source of enjoyment. However, meditation is also practice, a warmup for what is yet to come. The real payoff is when I take what meditation teaches me and use it to be connected through the day. Then I discover what it feels like to live connected and how enjoyable the day can really be.