The festive season is upon us! I love the Christmas season because people reach down inside themselves, into their essential goodness, and open their hearts to the world.
Unfortunately people tend to attribute all their good feelings to the celebration of the season and the Christmas holiday. They do not realize that the joy and happiness they feel are really their true nature. Deep within each one of us lies an awareness that is peaceful, loving and joyful.
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Good evening and welcome to Monday Group Meditation. We will be sitting from 7:30 to 10:00 PM EST. It is not necessary to sit for the entire extended time, which is set up to make it convenient for people in four North American Time Zones; sit for as long as you like and when it is most convenient for you. Monday Group Meditation is open to everyone, believers and non-believers, who are interested in gathering in silence. If you are new to meditation and would like to try it for yourself, Mindful Nature gave a good description of one way to meditate in an earlier diary, copied and pasted below:
"It is a matter of focusing attention mostly. In many traditions, the idea is to sit and focus on the rising and falling of the breath. Not controlling it, but sitting in a relaxed fashion and merely observing experiences of breathing, sounds, etc. Be aware of your thoughts, but don't engage in them. When your mind wanders (it will, often), then return to focus on breath and repeat."
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Being born into a human body brings with it a forgetfulness of that profound awareness, and as well just under our normal day to day awareness is a subtle current of unnamed fear. If you don’t believe me, you can do your own experiment by paying attention and noticing how frequently a defensive, guilty response arises automatically within you and the people around you. You can also pay attention and notice how much of your self talk is defensive and about trying to build yourself up with observations of how others are doing something wrong, or are somehow not quite as good as you.
Looking for any distraction to cover up the underlying fear of our own inadequacy, we go through life continually seeking outside ourselves for pleasure, fulfillment and distraction. We make a strategy of avoiding it with conditioned thinking and observations about our lives and reality in general. We are so afraid of confronting this fear, that we cover our hearts in a shell and become numb to our own fear, and numb to much of life as it arises in front of us. This is true of humans all over the world in every culture, religion and ethnicity. It is Human Nature.
It is true we cannot sustain open hearted Christmas Spirit through an act of will. We need to practice to see below all the conditioned thinking and distractions, we need to intend to become acquainted with our essential goodness. As a practice it requires slowing down and uncovering silence through the use of tools like meditation, self inquiry or centering prayer, which make it possible for us to reveal the peace, love and joy that exist within us in every moment.
It really is possible, we are all capable of breaking through the protective shell that covers our hearts and making Christmas Spirit last.
Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.~ Rumi