Giving yourself what you want
This month has been rich with learning and self enquiry for me. As I've shared with some of you during group meditations, this year was exceptionally busy for me (through my own doing). For a big chunk of the year I spent time doing part-time consulting in addition to teaching, running retreats, supporting people in our meditation community & my mentoring work. In November I finished up consulting, moved house, and in truth I'm still recovering from an enormous amount of activity and output this year.
I very intentionally decided that December was going to be a slow month for me, to recharge my batteries & devote myself to fulfilling some fundamental needs I've been neglecting. The transition from a consistently over-full schedule to slow, spacious days has served as a reminder for me of the resistance we often experience to giving ourselves what we really want.
What I've noticed happening for me these last few weeks is a tussle between listening to and honouring what I really want to do (go to the beach for a swim, lie on the couch listening to a podcast, head out for a slow stroll) and what my conditioned mind would like to convince me is more important than listening to my desire (work on my 2024 Bali retreat so I can open the doors before Christmas, go for a walk to deliver letterbox flyers sharing my offerings, refresh my post Vedic meditation course email series etc.)
Now that I've actually created the opportunity to have a slow month, there's also been space for old conditioned beliefs around doing and productivity to rear their head. So while I've continued to honour and fulfil my desires, there's also been a fair amount of witnessing, acknowledging and continued surrender of old ways of thinking.
This is SO COMMON when it comes to giving ourselves what we want. There's our ability and resourcefulness to do / have the thing, and then there's the question of whether we will actually allow ourselves to have it, once we have the resources in place.
What the Veda teaches us, is that the nature communicates what our most evolutionary course of action is, moment by moment, through what feels innately appealing to us. That natural feeling of really wanting to do / not do something, is intelligent. It's communication from our higher self. (I'll state what's probably obvious to you and say that addictive / abusive impulses and behaviours are an entirely different conversation).
Can you think of something you desire to do / experience, that for whatever reason you are withholding from yourself? I'm willing to bet there's something there. It could be anything from having a whole day entirely to yourself, to turning down an invitation for something you really don't want to go to but have said yes from a sense of obligation, to gifting an object or experience to yourself.
One of the things that starts to happen as we deepen into a consistent Vedic meditation practice, is that we start to feel, sense and hear our innate desires more clearly. It's not to say the thoughts of "but you can't do that" don't still come - like I've shared, in creating the conditions for a spacious December, I've also created the space for some of my lingering conditioning to surface and be lovingly examined and replaced.
The difference is that as a meditator, your natural desires become less and less ambiguous. An opportunity to do something you really desire to do (like attend a meditation retreat) might present itself, and if it’s a yes, you’ll feel that yes in your body. You might experience push back and resistance from your mind and your intellect, but the yes in your body will be felt irrespective. It’s in courageously starting to follow our yeses and our nos and creating a bank of evidence for the intellect that this works out well for us, that it becomes easier and more frictionless to follow the feeling and not the thoughts.
The more deeply we come to know ourselves through meditation, the less hiding we're able to do from what feels good and true to us. This is an incredibly potent gift. While having this direct and irrefutable knowing of what is true for you wont always be comfortable, it will always bring you closer to a life that feels authentically yours. A life that is yours, on your terms, in your way. When all is said an done, isn't that what we all want to experience?