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Onward through the fog


 
A friend in Program says:

When we first start to practice meditation as part of Step 11, we tend to be torn between two ways of looking at the activity. On the one hand, it seems very difficult and just a little bit tentative. However hard it may be to sit still for five or ten minutes, however difficult it may seem to focus our attention on one place for that time, however arduous it may be constantly to bring our wandering mind back to the object at hand, we are for the first time in our lives actually practicing meditation instead of merely talking or reading about it; but it seems that even so we have merely a tenuous grasp on the practice.

But the other way of looking at it can be based in the seductive areas of complacency and achievement. After all, we reason, we are now meditating for ten minutes. Not only that, we're doing it every day. Surely that's enough, isn't it? If we meditate each day for ten minutes, then we'll get ... what?

The answer, unfortunately, is not very much. Meditation isn't a skill, to be measured in terms of achievement and self-congratulation. It's an activity associated with a journey, and each stage of that journey is merely a waypoint, a place to mark on the road, but never a place to stay. Whatever our progress in meditation, it is only a gateway to further progress. If this seems a little disheartening, we may care to remember what a friend said about it in a recent meeting: I'd rather be meditating and wondering why I'm doing it, than not meditating and wondering why I'm not doing it.

"The spiritual life is never one of achievement:
it is always one of letting go."

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