The Lesson:
Part of the human experience is that we get to play the Ultimate Game of Hide and Seek. We forget who we are so we can remember who we are.
When we remember, we realize that we are and always have been whole. We are and always have been complete. We are and always have been full. We are and always have been expressions of Divine Grace and therefore, there’s really Nowhere to go. (Except to the Nowhere Bar. They’re not paying me for this plug. But if you’re ever in Cabo, do head down to the marina, have a seat looking out at the boats, get a cold one and think of me.)
The Practice:
Transcendental Meditation.
There is no more powerful tool that I have learned and practiced than Transcendental Meditation (or The Gap) for helping me to remember that “there’s Nowhere to go.” Every single time I practice this meditation for at least 5 minutes, I have the same experience. If you were watching me, you’d see me sitting still with my eyes closed, and then at one point I’d smile. You’d wonder why that was. And the reason is this: in that very moment, I am remembering. I am washed over with the same sense of pure serenity, okayness, and peace that I felt on that epic second to final night at the club when I surrendered to the universe. Pure stillness and lightness. (I learned this meditation weeks after this Cabo trip ended. It would’ve come in handy down there!)
The reason this meditation has the nickname, The Gap, is because when you practice it, when you permit your mind to hush, once in a while you enter into perhaps the most elusive space for a human to go – the space between thoughts.
No form of meditation has been more thoroughly researched. And it was actually made popular in western cultures because of The Beatles. They hired their own guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and he taught them the practice.
There is an abundance of information online about Transcendental Meditation/The Gap, so I will simply give you the gist here.
Plan for 20 minutes. Sit comfortably. Be still (a still body helps to create a still mind). Start to become a disinterested observer of the activity of your mind. Your mind will be firing off thought after thought after thought. All kinds of thoughts. Some pleasant, some unpleasant. Stop caring about any of them. Just let your mind do its thought pumping and don’t give a damn about any of it. Don’t care about the nature of the thoughts. Don’t care about the number of thoughts. Stop caring at all. LET them come and LET them go.
And as you do that, you are throttling back, so to speak. You have taken your foot off of the gas pedal of the thought pumping vehicle, you’ve thrown it into neutral and it is gradually coming to rest. Don’t care about that either. Just LET it occur. (This practice, by the way, is as close to doing nothing as we can ever get while still breathing. You’re literally letting yourself stop going to the effort of even creating thought.) You’re not “trying” to go thoughtless. It’s the opposite of that. You’re permitting your mind to chill. Those are two very different things. And just sit.
When you have the thought, “Am I doing this right?” Let it go! Let all of the thoughts come and go. And they all go when you don’t care about them (HUGE lesson in that).
That’s it. Simple as that. Once in a while you’ll have the experience of pure thoughtlessness. And you’ll think to yourself, “WOW! I’m in The Gap!” Which effectively and humorously takes you right OUT of The Gap. Let that thought go as well.
Once you’ve finished, before you stand up and move on, take about 45 more seconds to notice the stillness that you’ve created. Take that stillness with you wherever you’re going next.
Mantras:
I am an expression of Divine Grace in human form.
I am whole. I am Complete. There is no void.
I am the entire universe pretending to be human.
Many years ago I took a trip to Cabo that turned into an unexpected journey of rapid, deep personal transformation.
This post is one of sixteen excerpts of a piece of writing that I did, that was inspired by this magical experience.
Each “chapter” contains a lesson that can be categorized as a lesson in Mental Toughness, personal development, or spiritual growth.
These chapters have been organized into three segments: the Lesson theory, a Practice, and relevant Mantras to help you in your own journey.
