Meditation, and "Getting Better"
"Getting better" is a common ideal, and expectation
to advance through life and love, toward living happily ever after.
First we seek school degrees, and later careers, homes, and families
but in seeking a better future, we may fail to live fully in the present.
Many problems result from our wanting to be better.
We work toward a better house, car, or spouse,
rather than appreciating and dealing with what we have
and with our life in its current complexity.
We may think meditation will improve us,
but meditation is instead to know oneself deeply
including our behavioral motivations and emotions,
our fears, doubts, anger, and blaming.
Through meditation we may in part awaken
only to find ourselves neurotic and miserable
since our awakening does not necessarily alter
poor relationships, bad habits, neurosis, or psychosis.
A psychologist writes that through meditation,
students more readily attain some realization
than actualizion of the basic religious principles:
compassion, sharing, and love in relationships.
When faced with students' real needs and problems
even meditation teachers fail in compassion and love
due frequently to unresolved psychological and emotional problems
inherited from childhood, parents, and social situation.
In meditation, students and teachers may bypass problems
adhering to principles such as non-attachment and emptiness
while unconsciously accumulating guilt and shame
for failing to live and love, much less attain their principles.
Despite realization, personal problems frustrate actualization
through stored depths of unresolved emotional and mental fixations
that for social reasons we condition ourselves to conceal
frequently leading to isolation and alienation in relationships.
We may still get better through therapy and/or meditation
since deep awareness itself lets inborn intelligence mediate
personal problems, limits, and bad habits.
The book Emotional Alchemy by Tara Bennet Goleman
offers one approach to understanding and dealing with emotional factors through mindfulness.
Another book, by Cheri Huber,
"(Contrary to what you have been taught)
There is Nothing Wrong with You"
provides a complementary perspective, as
does Huber's key advise.
Meditation, and Mind