As I head back to New York from a lovely family gathering in Massachusetts, a young person in the car just asked about my new year’s resolution. It’s very boring.
Notice all thoughts, slough off 98% of them, and meditate to clarity—
no matter how short-lived that clarity it is—every day.
If the purpose of resolutions is to end bad habits and to open up more to one’s purpose and joy in life, meditation takes us there by increasing awareness of the shenanigans of the mind—the thoughts to which we grasp, sometimes at our peril. In a person eating ice cream every night, maybe the thought is, “After the day I just had, I deserve a treat.” In a person smoking, maybe the thought is, “I just need to relax and this will really help me.” If it’s overeating, maybe the thought is, “This food is so good I just have to have more.” If undereating, “I feel overweight and I mustn’t eat a complete meal.” If not living one’s mission, “I have to learn more and get more experience before I venture out.” If not changing jobs when it’s clearly time, “It’s too risky in this climate to make a move.” The amount of self-defeating thought is unlimited, matched by unlimited limitations. Meditation is the way through. It brings a clear awareness of one’s thoughts and holds them in view against a backdrop of all possibilities. This is why a commitment to daily meditation might be the most powerful new year’s resolution of all. The awareness of thought along with uncovering how we acquiesce to it opens a panoramic vision of the ways in which the mind has been elevated to authority instead of the gut. The gut’s role is to know our the path and to exhibit the feeling of all short, medium and long term goals. The mind’s purpose is to figure out the practicalities of forging the path to and through those goals. While all this is going on, the mind has access to all thoughts, as it must if we are to be able to exercise free will. And most of what it swims in are the chatter and nonsense aspects of the realm of human thought, often debilitating nonsense that we believe without thinking twice. This is how bad habits arise. “You deserve ice cream and cheese cake now.” Was that your idea, or did the thought float in? To act on it or to slough it off is a function of free will. Constant awareness of this whole play comes through sitting quietly for half an hour a day and simply focussing on the breath—the inhalation, the turn, he exhalation, the turn, the inhalation, over and over. Given time, meditation brings the experience our own vastness together with the huge breadth of all possibilities.
Happy New Year and may you enjoy calm daily sitting and its limitless and surprising benefits.
Ann Cecil-Sterman
On the Mass Pike.
December 30, 2024.