A Horse In The Living Room

So gather round kids and let me tell you a tale of a mind that went away.

Honestly, I have been making a real effort to do my mindless meditation on a regular basis. By mindless I don't mean out of your mind, or with out mindful-ness, or with out attention even, I mean to still your mind until it feels like a feather has captured your every thought and floated skyward with them, ascending to the stars and the silence of space. Then you seem mindless. For a minute. Or two.

I am still trying to get the hang of sitting still and quiet for 15 or 20 minutes. Ask my kindergarten teacher, she will tell you I just don't sit still very well. She used to tell me that It seemed that I "must have a horde of jumping beans in my pants".

I decided to help myself keep my mind still, and by association, my body, by using a cd of shamanic drumming as a prop for my meditation attempts. This cd is about 25 minutes long. Shamanic drumming is done in a tempo and frequency that assists your mind to enter the meditative state. Maybe that is cheating when it comes to meditation practice, but what can I say, I'm just trying to over come the jumping beans in my pants. Maybe some day I won't need a crutch.

The drumming varies a little through out the course of the 25 minutes I spent trying to keep my mind fully focused on the drums and only the drums. Every time a thought about life, work, the weather, home, food, grasshoppers, or anything else came into focus I said "Woa Nelly! Get your mind right back to the drumming!" There were actually long moments when I just stayed with the drums. I found the 25 minutes just breezing by like a Harley on a sunny spring morning.

And guess what folks- nobody noticed that I wasn't working for 25 minutes. No one called to find out why I was missing. No one sent a search and rescue party. The earth did not stand still because I carved 25 minutes out of my busy day to try find a little nothingness. I'm sure we all scurry around like ants from a anthill that has been breached because we think we must. If we don't we won't do enough, get enough, be enough, we just won't fit in and someone is going to notice and trouble will ensue and there will be hell to pay. Now I'm pretty sure that is not the case. We just mistakenly think it is.

So I carved out 25 minutes a few days in a row, and I sat and focused on the drumming. Each time I did, it seemed that the 25 minutes went by faster than it had the time before. I found myself better able to follow the drum beats, with out constantly reminding myself that that was what I was supposed to be doing. I was managing to keep my breathing long, deep, rhythmical and even. Oh, don't get me wrong, my mind was still flopping around like a fish on the end of a line, but it was flopping less each time.

Then miraculously, at the very end of one of these meditation/shamanic drumming breaks from the world, my mind stopped. I don't know how long it was like that, because I wasn't thinking about it. But I could feel the still. And then I saw myself sitting in the chair, and a crack started on the top of my head and ran down the middle of my body. A crack like you see on thin ice over a pond. The crack didn't make any noise, it just crept down the middle of my body, then the two halves of my dissected self fell away and beams of white and golden light came spilling out of my inside. Then I heard a horse neighing right next to my right ear.

Then I was back in the chair listening to the drums and wondering what the heck just happened, and of course you can't be mindless when you are trying to figure out how a horse got into your living room, so that was the end of my meditation for the day.