Meditation

"We watch a sunlight dust dance, and we try to be that lively, but nobody knows what music those particles hear. Each of us has a secret companion musician to dance to. Unique rhythmic play, a motion in the street we alone know and hear." ~ Rumi  

I've been feeling a lot of pressure lately. A lot of pressure to be a certain something, do a certain something. I've had responsibilities pulling me in so many different directions, which each responsibility telling me that it is the most important and deserves my full attention. No wonder I've been withdrawing from social scenes and acting extremely introverted lately.

Over the next 12 weeks I'm going through Richard Foster's Book "Celebration of Discipline" where one by one, he takes you through 12 different spiritual disciplines. This week is meditation. The difference between Christian meditation and other forms of meditation (such as Buddhist meditation) is that while the goal in most spiritual meditation involves emptying the mind and detaching from the world, Christian meditation involves filling the mind with and attaching to God. It's very essence, explains Foster, is to be able to hear God's voice and obey His word.

Meditation is scary. It quiets the mind and quiets all the external voices from other people that tell me who I should be and what I should do. That leaves me with God. Just me and God. No one and nothing else to hide behind.

I often look at people who do it all and do it all well and I envy them. I envy how their lives are so put together and how they can be so accomplished and successful. And I think that envy is a catalyst for my taking on so much and thinking that I can do everything. I see role models in my life and wonder how I can be more like them. Yet as Rumi says, we can only dance to our own secret music companion. My life is going to be different from theirs, and I can only live my own life and not someone else's. And I'm realizing that the only way I can hear the music companion of my own life is to be alone and sit in meditation in front of the Creator of the universe.