Reading Stephen Cope: Getting a Gold Star for Noble Failure

I read chapter two, Close Encounters with Mind of Stephen Cope's The Wisdom of Yoga, on Friday afternoon, thinking that I could let it settle and turn into blogging material over the weekend. Knowing also that, during the weekend, I would not find a lot of reading time.

Because we've had one of "those" weekends.

You know the kind: when you can barely breathe because you are running from one thing to the next. They happen more often in the Summer than at any other time of year.

This weekend started with a morning phone call on Saturday letting us know that Marcy's friend and colleague had passed away. Barely able to pause and take that in, we had (expected) company arrive from out of town. Barely able to rest, we had to get ready for a wedding.

You get the idea.

How appropriate, too, that I was having this sort of weekend while reading this sort of book.

It seems to me that this sort of weekend is the whole point of this book: this external hamster wheel is but a shadow of the hamster wheels on which we run, run, run in our minds.

Chapter two is all about the beginning of meditation and the immediate fruit that is the noticing of your own patterns.

My forms of meditation (and I believe there are an infinite variety) include physical yoga and the rosary. And oh! The things that I think during these two honorable practices just about make me blush!

But here's the thing...the longer I do these things, the faster I notice all the chit chat in my brain and the faster I then can pull myself gently away from it, getting back to the pose and the breath or the feel of the bead and the prayer.

As Stephen Cope says:

Once we begin to dis-identify with the current
of thoughts on the surface of the mind,
concentration automatically deepens.

This reminds me of another way that I enter this stillness, this thing called meditation: bird watching, and I do mean "watching."

I do not seek out the birds. I do not keep a check list of birds. I do not drive hundreds or fly thousands of miles and climb mountains or trek through rain forest to find birds.

I watch birds. I sit in one spot and become still enough physically that they go back to their business, noticing me no more than a tree.

In this process, my mind becomes utterly still. There is nothing but inner peace and a purely senses-based awareness of feather and color and song.

When I started birding like this a few years ago, it was the first time I really broke through my monkey mind into this still space. It was the first time in a long time when I felt connected to everything around me and knew, for sure, that all shall be well.

It was the first time that I had gotten far enough into the Noble Failure that I could see there was a way out, a way beyond, a different way.

Some questions for you based on this week's reading:

Have you gotten your Gold Star for Noble Failure yet? Have you started to notice the patterns your mind falls into?

What ways do you meditate in your life?

Can you expand the definition of "meditation" for yourself?

(Photo Credit, Christine C. Reed, Perennial Geranium, 2009)