Without Any Real Effort

Without any Real Effort:

so now I'm  approaching the end of my meditation instructors training, six months of learning how to teach, and after 30 years of practice - every aspect leading to this point has been life changing for me. I'm fortunate to have discovered meditation during a troubled time of heavy drinking, loneliness, the end of a long term relationship, and so many unanswered questions concerning my life's path, actually, so many questions simply unasked for fear of having no answers. Meditation helped me gain the courage to ask, and more so, to be okay with the fear of not knowing answers, or even what to ask of myself. What my practice did was to help me relax as the person that I was, while providing space for the person that I found myself becoming. It still does, and all without any real effort to this cause, just a natural unfolding of my life. 

easy, effortless. 

yet not without action. 

and that's an important understanding, for when there's talk of least effort it's sometimes taken as no action at all, a passive approach to life, and this couldn't be farther than the truth at all. My example is ending my relationship with alcohol, that it wasn't a battle of hard knuckle withdrawal, filled with interventions and rooms of smoke filled meetings. Although that's a path so many have to take, it wasn't mine, for whatever reason, but mostly simply the grace of something unexplained - it was my time to stop drinking. I somehow knew this, and so I moved myself into alignment with whatever energy was drawing me to new directions. Without any real effort. But with definite actions taken. Drinking was a way of life for me, sociable, my friendships were all bar related, and I drank with singular purpose - my goal was to alter the perception of myself through consumption of alcohol. In other words, I drank for the sole reason of getting drunk. Period, And I did, daily, even as I maintained a rigid fitness routine, competitive in martial arts and weightlifting. But never truly happy. 

being in alignment healed me, helped me find a happiness that was independent of my goals, of career, and relationships. Meditation helped bring me into alignment. The process for me wasn't to rid myself of flaws but to find myself fully whole with every single perceived flaw, to just allow myself to be exactly and only what I was through every given moment. There isn't any real effort in this sense of being...life simply is, and continues to unfold as so.

easy, effortless.

what meditation did for me, does, is to help keep me responsive, open, trusting that I remain aligned with life, indeed, that there is only life in full alignment. There isn't any real effort in being alive, no struggle for breath to find me, my body functions with a wisdom of its own. So I relax in my true nature, an aspect of life, human, flawed only through my own perceptions. It's healing to simply allow myself to be...and meditation provides me the space for this healing to occur. 

and all without any real effort. 

~

Peace, Eric