I'm always amazed at how time can fly by when you get busy doing something you enjoy. I am in the midst of making a new series of self-hypnosis recordings, creating a storefront for my website and a whole bunch of similar endeavors. I started the whole task mid-morning (after shamelessly oversleeping - again). Before I knew it, it was mid-afternoon.
In the process, I found a bunch of things had happened - nearly all of them positive, but none of them anticipated. I had several client inquiries and a couple of bookings. I had a whole lot of mail exchanges with people regarding presentations at new age shows, marketing booths, etc. I am starting to get in the swing of things (I hope) in getting a business going and so I find myself getting busier and busier. And then, as I was getting back to work on my CD's, my CD/DVD drive started to act up.
Perfect timing, of course. This laptop is several years old, now, and I've been expecting something to start acting up. But at this stage of the game, I can't afford to be without a computer. So the question arises. Do I take it in or do I simply work around the problem until some more convenient time to replace the CD. Questions like that are like fuel for the fire that keeps the mind turning way too long late at night. Progress continues, but so do the little hiccups.
This evening (about twenty minutes ago, actually) I was sitting up, intending to meditate for a bit before packing it in. I usually follow the Himalayan Tradition of meditation. In this tradition, one focuses inward on the breath, and then begins the mantra, thought silently in synchrony with the breath. In this case, at first, I felt myself going into a meditative state. Then suddenly, the mind chatter came back in full force - what most yogic traditions refer to as the monkey mind. It is the flood of random thoughts, one leading to another, wandering away from the meditative thought stream. One thought leads to another and before you know it, I am thinking about what I had for dinner the last Tuesday I was in California.
Usually one simply acknowledges the thought and lets it float past, wandering off to the oblivion from which it came. Still, the monkey chatter is one of those annoying little features of the human mind. It also tells me how out of practice I am, how little time I have actually spent meditating in the last few months.
In the end, the challenge is to turn off the busy-ness of the day, quiet the monkey mind, do a half-hour of meditation, and then pack it in. The challenge is, once the pack-it-in part has begun, to let the chatter finally return to the background, letting my own mind drift in to sleep. In the background, I hope remaining there, go the images of a day's worth of progress, a bulky CD drive and a whole lot of chattering monkeys.
