Introductory Reading
by Mark Allen Pelkey
I found that the difficult part about meditating was overcoming the implication that I'm not “OK” without this addition to my psyche. In other words I'm somehow deficient and must do something “therapeutic” to adjust my mind. I think this misapprehension runs deep, so deep as to not be casually recognized as an impediment to changing one's perspective.
Yet what is meditation but a form of knowledge? And who of us does seek more knowledge as we proceed through life? It matters not that this knowledge is not traditionally academic but in fact knowledge of oneself.
Beginning a discipline of meditation was perhaps a bit easier for me in that I didn't take up the practice until I found myself in an environment where the proposition was already in place that I needed to effect some changes in my life – alcoholic rehab. Having established at the outset that I wanted to “therapize” myself it was an easy next step to conclude that any and all measures could be invoked to effect the desired outcome.
So I resurrected a simple yet nonetheless challenging discipline I had learned some 30 years earlier. This consisted of merely sitting motionless for 3 consecutive minutes. Considering that there are one thousand, four hundred and forty such minutes available each and every day this hardly seems a daunting proposition.
It turns out however that we humans have very little experience with stillness and I found it more comfortable to simply start with one minute at a time and work my way up to three. After a while I noticed that I was no longer startled by stillness. Thereafter I found a spot of tranquility from which I could observe and enjoy the comings and goings of my mind. This in turn produces a feeling of placid control and “centering” which has the effect of making the vicissitudes of the day occur more smoothly.
