The Gentle Breeze of Inner Stillness...
As Bob Dylan sang, “The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind…” Meditation is like the wind. The answer to many of our life’s questions lies in the quiet stillness of the passing internal breeze. It can never be fully understood until it has been thoroughly experienced.
As much as we want to understand meditation, to define it, contain it and study it… the extent of its full power continues to slip through our grasp. We seek to understand this invisible force flowing through our lives; we all know it is there, and we respect its power, but our mind is baffled by its lack of form. While our soul longs to dance in its gentle ever-changing flow.
Just as we seek open spaces to feel the freedom of expansion and take deep, full breathes of clean, untouched air, we practice meditation to create that open space within so we can breathe deeply into the pure, untouched oxygen of our soul. We patiently wait to see the effect as we observe old things being blown away and new things being brought in. We watch in wonder and amazement as feelings emerge, old habits pass, and images float past our mind’s eye like clouds floating over a valley.
This gentle breeze, guiding us through this sometimes harsh and jarring world, becomes the breath in which we seek. Transparent to the mind, but fuel to our hearts, we inhale the quiet stillness to nourish us on a deeper level. We strive to align that which we experience during our meditation, which we experience in our waking life… longing to bridge the inner world with the outer world… to unify the breath of our soul to the breath that fills our lungs.
We learn to trust our meditation because our inner senses believe this subtle breeze to be just as powerful, if not more than the wind that tangles our hair. The surrender to this natural force of life allows something greater to help shape us, trusting that these fleeting moments suspended in time are being held and guided by a greater force of change, even though all we experience is the quiet stillness of our mind.
As our meditations become more profound, we lift our ears to the echo of silence held in the passing moment and tune into the whispers of our soul. This vital breath of the universe has flowed through galaxies, past stars, around the moon and planets, through endless valleys, and traveled to the highest mountain peaks. It is somehow holding us all together in its vast void of life. Breathing deeply and tuning into the infinite power that it holds just for us.
We grow to listen to its wisdom and trust its process, no matter how gentle or harsh. Each moment of stillness builds like the single flap of a butterflies wings contributing to the momentum of something far greater. We lean more into the experience than trying to understand… and if the mind strays too much to seek concrete proof… we will remind ourselves this “The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind,” let go and allow our soul to dance in the ever-changing flow of the internal breeze. Then Inner transformation will inevitably follow, just like ripples upon the waters of time.
Master Glenn J Mendoza MD
Dawn M Myers
17 May 2020