If there is one thing that I am sure of from practicing meditation while working it is that the less serious I take myself the happier I am. When I take myself seriously and make myself the star of my personal movie, which is usually a drama where I have been under appreciated my whole life, I couldn’t be less comfortable in my own skin. Being the star and being important is a lot of pressure. You always have to worry what others think, how you look, and have to defend your character a lot to keep his role going on.
A very important lesson I have recently learned and am still learning is that meditation for spiritual growth and to know who I am can’t be done while wanting to hold on to my dramatic story, and letting that go seems to be a big process and part of the path to my true Self. I have to ask myself regularly, “How serious is this problem? Is this effecting the purpose of my life or just my character in this story that I am identifying with?”. One of the things I do to help me is to think about how insignificant the issues are to me today that seemed so important 20 years ago.  After all when I was 6 years old getting that cookie seemed like the most important thing in the world lol.
Although that may help to put things into a different perspective, focusing on my heart and breathing helps put me back into the right experience. The more I practice the more I see that there is a difference between me and my thoughts and emotions. Using my thoughts may help put a band-aid on the problem momentarily but through meditation I keep finding that identifying with my thoughts is the problem to begin with. It’s the same thing as identifying with the character in the drama, and as long as you are starring in it what else can you experience but the drama?
Letting go of this to get that seems to be the daily motif these days. To experience for myself what it means to be my true Self I have to let go of the importance of my character. I have found that laughing at myself, making fun of myself, and talking about myself in the third person is a little helpful. I can say things like, “Oh, poor Matt isn’t getting the respect he so obviously deserves.” Again this helps to change the thoughts to a different point of view but to focus on my heart and breathing during my daily routine brings about an actual experience of my true Self. When experiencing this there is much less thought and it is detached from my sense of Self. I like to say there is less Matt.
When not taking myself to seriously there is less thoughts and less Matt and more of a sense of peace, happiness, and aliveness. There is joy for no reason. As I interact with others there is a strong pull on me to go back into my sense of “Mattness”. When in that sense of Mattness I look in the mirror and see me. When in the sense of my true Self I look in the mirror and see a body that is not me at all. It’s times like this when spirituality seems to be nothing more than a case of mistaken identity and a process of retracing my steps back to the real me, nothing more nor mystical.
Before being around others that pull me into Mattness seemed like a curse. When my consciousness is high it seems like everything is a blessing from heaven and is there to help me find my true identity again. Without those people pulling there is no chance in daily life to do the work. With those people there is no need to escape to a mountain and meditate. I heard someone say the only way out of this world is through it. Family members seem to have the strongest gravity to pull me into Mattness. I heard someone else say that if you think you are enlightened spend a week with your parents, lol. In that sense family, friends, and spouses can be the greatest tools in daily life to practice meditation and awaken to the true Self. When I can have a total equanimity around all of these people through out an entire day I think I will celebrate and thank them a lot. Looking forward to that day.