If meditation is meant to be effortlessness, why is it so hard?

Posted on January 13, 2025 by Louise Gallagher

I had let my morning meditation practice slip until a few weeks ago. Even though I knew my mornings flowed more smoothly after dipping into the quiet, my “critter mind” was urging me to practice avoidance, not meditation. And I’m well practiced in avoidance.

This morning, as I breathed and worked hard on letting my thoughts dissolve, they drifted in effortlessly, like clouds on a blue sky day. Pushing them away? Nope. Cajoling them into quiet? Ineffective. Corraling them into good behavior? Useless. I simply had to allow. To let go and let be.

Isn’t meditation supposed to be effortless? Isn’t it supposed to be refreshing? Why then is it so hard to simply allow? To let go and let be? Why does “the quiet” feel so elusive when it’s all I’m seeking?

Wikipedia defines meditation as “a practice in which an individual uses a technique to train attention and awareness and detach from reflexive, ‘discursive thinking,’ achieving a mentally clear and emotionally calm and stable state, while not judging the meditation process itself.”

Not judging is even harder sometimes than meditating! My “critter mind” likes to disrupt my attempts at sitting in the silence with its litany of reasons why sitting in the silence is nothing to achieve. A busy mind keeps you safe, it seems to say. And I wonder, when did running around in circles ever get anyone anywhere? (Besides maybe dizzy.)

Prayer is defined as “an invocation or act that seeks to activate a rapport with a deity, an object of worship, or a spiritual entity through deliberate communication.”

And my facile mind immediately jumps to, “For what purpose?” Why pray if it’s only to activate a connection with something or someone I cannot see? Isn’t the whole purpose of meditation to make it possible for me to live in the reality of now so that I don’t spin my wheels in the unknown?

And my awakened mind responds, “Release your judgments. Trust the process. Be still.”

And so my meditation goes. Seldom easy. Always enlightening. Stretching me beyond my thoughts into wonderment and awe at our human capacity to think, and outthink, our own thinking.

Meditation

Unbidden, thoughts drift in,
filling the mind's vastness,
a cornucopia of ideas
dancing like sunlight
on rippling water.

Prayer

Focused, thoughts ascend,
filling the universe
with yearning pleas,
seeking grace
in a world of pain and shadow.

Awake

Released, thoughts gather,
filling my being
with hopeful whispers,
calling me to presence,
to let go,
to simply be.

Mystic Misty Morning

Posted on January 12, 2024 by Louise Gallagher

Veiled dawn whispers soft,
Winter’s breath stills the chorus,
Silent wings await.

The world outside is veiled in a mist, a natural shroud rendering the familiar unfamiliar. Beyond my window, trees stand still, their dark branches etched like delicate filigree against the dawn’s pale blue canvas.

Wrapped in the warmth of my shawl, I am seated at my desk, the hum of the furnace mingling with the ethereal voices of Stile Antico’s “Sanctus: Benedictus”—holy and blessed, they sing.

As the morning unfolds, a silent mist glides over the river, rising and swirling like whispered prayers sent to watching angels.

In this quietude, my heart sends out its own prayers:

For the safety of all on this chilled day.
For the homeless to find sanctuary against the bone-biting cold.
For the caregivers, whose tireless efforts are lifelines in the dark waters of despair.
For the disheartened, whose dreams and hopes seem to dissipate like morning fog.
For wars to cease, and peace to settle softly upon the earth, quelling the violence and awakening awe in every heart.

I pray, too, for a path to peace to unveil itself before war extinguishes our collective breath.

_________________

I am in the midst of a 21-day journey—a course on prayer—chosen as spontaneously as the mist chooses its path each morning.

Prayer was my mother’s refuge, a legacy she passed to my sister, Jackie, who embraced it as naturally as breathing. As for me, prayer felt like an admission of weakness, a legacy of a rigid Catholic upbringing where an omnipresent God watched but seldom seemed compassionate. Vulnerability, I believed, was an invitation for wounds rather than healing.

Yet, as this new decade of my life unfolds, I am driven to challenge such relics of belief. Prayer, I am discovering, is not a weakness but a communion; vulnerability, not an exposure to harm, but an opening to grace.

It’s in the act of surrender that I’m finding unexpected strength. In the willingness to let go of my resistance to question the unexamined tenets I’ve held—not because they serve me, but because their familiarity is a deceptive comfort.

Like the mist that conceals yet reveals, I am learning to navigate through the opacity of my doubts and fears. To trust in the insights that come from not knowing, from being present in the discomfort of exploration.

Change, like the ever-shifting mist, is constant. And in its midst, I find that prayer, too, has found its steadfast place in my life.

Namaste

Have you given thanks today?

Posted on September 4, 2015 by Louise Gallagher

The mind is like a crazy monkey, which leaps about and never stays in one place. It is completely restless and constantly paranoid about its surroundings. From “Trapping the Monkey” in THE TEACUP AND THE SKULLCUP: CHOGYAM TRUNGPA ON ZEN AND TANTRA. Page 72

Lying in bed, ‘doing nothing’, is a great opportunity to reflect, and to ‘do nothing’. At least, it would be a great time for such indulgence if my monkey mind didn’t keep interfering.

“Don’t be so lazy. Get busy.” Its voice whispers with a sibilant hiss oozing like steam seeping from a lumbering volcano.

The more rational part of me leaps in to defend my indolence. “Get busy doing what? I don’t have to go into the office today. It’s an extra long weekend. Relax.”

But still the monkey mind persists. “There’s gotta be something you can do. Quit lying there justifying lying there. Nobody likes a lazy person.”

Ahhh, the power of the monkey mind to disturb peace of mind and tranquility.

Oh, and Beaumont the eager pup too! He wants to get out and play. I will him to relax. Be calm. Be patient.

Buddha is quoted as having said,“Patience is the greatest prayer.”

If I had one prayer, it would be, “Thank you.”

Perhaps gratitude is the most powerful force for healing.

As I lay in my bed I whisper to the birds at the feeder, “Thank you for brightening my day. Thank you for your song. Your lithesome spirit. Your twittering verse.”

I look up through the green leaves turning gold of the birch and the red buds of crabapples peaking out through leaves and gaze up at dull grey sky above and whisper, “Thank you for your shade. Your whispering leaves. Your beauty.”

Gratitude.

To fall into prayer I must surrender my ego’s need to justify my existence — my state of doing nothing, as well as my state of doing ‘busy’. To surrender, I must release my need to feel that everything I do matters. As my daughter Alexis wrote in a blog, “I am nothing. And everything… I do not matter. And yet, I am matter, so I must.”

I must surrender my need to matter enough that my matter becomes all that matters to me. When I matter enough to cherish the goodness in my being me, to respond from my highest good, no matter the weather, the time of day or night, or the circumstances surrounding me, then I will have fallen into that place where all that matters is — the moment in which I breathe.

I move into gratitude, the gateway to patience. If I had but one prayer, let it be, Thank you.

The question is: Have you given thanks today?