Into Your Meditation: Metaphors On Essential Elements of a Meditation Practice

By Noëlle Vignola, LCSW

he key pillars of a meditation practice can daunt even the most practiced spiritual traveler. In Into Your Meditation, author Noëlle Vignola explores these pillars through the playful use of metaphor and storytelling.

A life coach and social worker, Vignola breaks down a series of daily, bite-sized meditations. Arranged in thematic sections of seed, root, stem, branch, leaf, bloom, and fruit, each piece is designed to be brief and read before or after a sit. The selections can be read in any sequence and each stands alone as a practice piece.

Lovingly prepared for any spiritual traveler, the meditations offer food for thought to carry with you, not only in your sit, but throughout the day. Some will immediately resonate with you, while others may not. Take what serves you and feel free to leave the rest.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Jan 4, 2016
• ISBN: 9781483443027

Book preview

INTO YOUR

MEDITATION

Metaphors on Essential Elements of a Meditation Practice

NOËLLE VIGNOLA, LCSW

Copyright © 2015 Noëlle Vignola, LCSW.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of both publisher and author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

Scripture taken from the Holy Bible, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. All rights reserved worldwide. Used by permission. NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION® and NIV® are registered trademarks of Biblica, Inc. Use of either trademark for the offering of goods or services requires the prior written consent of Biblica US, Inc.

ISBN: 978-1-4834-4301-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-4303-4 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-4302-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015920402

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 12/14/2015

Contents

Introduction

SEED

1.   Begin Again

2.   Commitment

3.   Merlin

4.   Bead of Sweat

5.   Mystics

6.   Old Map

7.   Destruction

8.   Confusion

9.   Sewer Drain

10.   Kit Bag

11.   Double Helix

12.   Paramita

13.   Different Road

14.   Secret Garden

ROOT

15.   Most Sacred Place on Earth

16.   Skin

17.   But One Tool

18.   Where the Wild Things Are

19.   Demand

20.   Rock Salt and Jar of Salve

21.   Weakest Link

22.   Push and Pull

23.   First Drink

24.   Non-Conversation

25.   Warrior’s Nature

26.   Ringing of the World

27.   Bags of Gold

28.   One-Point Perspective

29.   Nature

30.   Sattva

31.   The East Wind

32.   Cracking of Winter

33.   Spirit Tree

STEM

34.   Mother Earth

35.   Pilgrimage

36.   Rock Balancing

37.   Applied Structure

38.   Versions of You

39.   Waiter and an Order

40.   Adaptability

41.   Stripping it Down

42.   Ronin

43.   Quality and Weight

44.   Pea Under Twenty Mattresses

45.   Fear

46.   Three-Legged Dog

47.   Legos

48.   Before the Dawn

49.   Curious Angle

50.   Ticking of a Clock

51.   Generosity

52.   Debris and a Dove

53.   Hero’s Journey

BRANCH

54.   Two Paths

55.   Tao Te Ching

56.   Aloneness versus Community

57.   Bridge

58.   Heroin Addict

59.   Wrong and Right

60.   Lone Star

61.   Meaning

62.   Untethered Boat

63.   Tethered Boat

64.   Carpenter’s Level

65.   Dark Violence

66.   Bad Travel

67.   Pig Pen

68.   Each Person

69.   Midnight Hour

70.   Driftwood

71.   Rocky Outcrop

72.   Moveable Feast

LEAF

73.   Opposite

74.   Marco Polo

75.   Self-Compassion

76.   Brick

77.   Horse Stable

78.   Flossing Your Teeth

79.   Spring Bud

80.   Refraction

81.   Steel and Wood

82.   Loneliness

83.   Racehorse

84.   Not Mind

85.   Rhythm

86.   Playing Small

87.   The Slot Machine

88.   Water

89.   Great Dam

BLOOM

90.   Heart Chakra

91.   Smoldering Embers

92.   Horae

93.   Air

94.   Exchanges

95.   Weary World

96.   Shift

97.   Growing Up

98.   Intersection

99.   Fasting

100.   Off the Cushion

101.   Dark Night

102.   Song

103.   Jingly Jangly

104.   Synchronicity

105.   Musical Note

106.   Field of Wildflowers

107.   Brilliance

FRUIT

108.   Heart of the Universe

109.   Vision

110.   The Watcher

111.   Eternity

112.   Swimming Pool

113.   Onion

114.   Boundary

115.   Hammock

116.   Rush

117.   Love

118.   Nepenthe

119.   Eden

120.   Smiles and Laughter

121.   Talents

122.   The South Wind

123.   Starlight

SEED

124.   Emptiness

125.   Enlightenment: The Verb

126.   Dead-End Road

127.   The West Wind

128.   Karma and Particle/Wave Theory

129.   Mystery

130.   Small Miracles

131.   Peace of a Long Day

132.   Rocks

133.   The North Wind

134.   Black and White

135.   Old Bone

136.   Reclamation and Redemption

137.   Spider

138.   Chrysalis

139.   New Year

140.   The Edge

141.   No Limits

142.   Casting of the Seed

About the Author

Endnotes

Dedication

This book would never have come to be without the Insight Timer app by Spotlight Six Software, LLC. I’d downloaded the app looking for a better chime for my meditations and walked into another world entirely. It is filled with international communities of meditators of every shape and size. These Insight Timer communities embrace the world’s faiths, such as Buddhism, Christianity and Judaism; New Age movements like Law of Attraction; and crossbreeds of physics and psychology. The support and nurturing I received here, as well as the encouragement to write this work, was immense. It lead to the start of the Into Your Meditation group on the Insight Timer app, and this book.

I owe a debt of gratitude to every member of my Into Your Meditation group, but within that group I extend enormous thanks to Juan Crocco who not only encouraged this work, but was the wonderful force behind my taking up photography. To Steven Johnson, a fellow poet and artist himself, who never let up on my need to do this. To Pete Jeffs, artist, healer and adventurer in re-creating himself and who has been one of my strongest cheerleaders. To Roy Mason who has not only believed in my work, but has promoted it as often as he could to my fellow readers. He should go into advertising. To Merridy Pugh, my lovely editor extraordinaire who has helped me structure and tailor this book into its present form. She has lead not only by effort, but by example in her own writing and personal transformations. To my aunt, Liz Costello-Kruzich who has read every blog post I’ve ever made and commented on most with enthusiasm. And to my best friends, Valerie Johnston, Timothy Young and Ike Mendoza who have read my work for what seems centuries and never stopped believing in my talent.

A thousand blessings of beauty, grace and love to you all.

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Introduction

I first began sitting meditation more than twenty years ago and my path will seem familiar to many. I’d keep the practice up for a few days, a few weeks or a couple of months and then fall off the wagon. Each failure at maintaining the practice increased my guilt that I was somehow flawed and undisciplined. I went to dharma centers and practiced at a Krishna temple for a while. I took in silent retreats and coursework in various spiritual teachings. I spent four months daily chanting that I was sure would stick and multiple meditation classes offered by New Age bookstores, A Course in Miracle Centers, Meetup.com groups and so on. I frequently thought of myself as spiritually lazy.

If I wasn’t sitting I was reading about sitting. If I wasn’t reading about sitting, I was buying books about sitting that I somehow felt were helping me merely by osmosis as they sat on my bookshelf. Hours were spent weeping over Hafiz and Rumi or writing Sufi stories in cards to friends. I read Castaneda and kept dream journals for years; gobbled up Gibran, von Bingen, and Rilke. My bookshelves looked as if I’d completed a Masters in theology, yet half I hadn’t even read. There was the period of a twelve-step program and a couple of years in a Christian community church in Dallas, even though I wasn’t Christian, because I’d seek answers just about anywhere. Yoga was the one stalwart standby that rarely left my side despite everything I tried or investigated. I practiced regularly and knew the calm it brought could be expanded on, if only I’d just sit down.

I longed for more inner peace and centeredness, but in truth, I’m not even sure I knew what that was. Such terms as peace, equanimity, enlightenment had become catch phrases I threw around, intellectually, but without a deeper heart connection to what any of it meant. I didn’t just have monkey mind as it is often referred to in meditation circles, I had chimps with barrels of ping pong balls inside my skull. I was the supreme over-thinker and I knew enough to know that there was really only one place to go.

Finally, eight years ago while studying Law of Attraction thinking I decided enough was enough. I realized for me I’d just have to forego the formalities. Ignore the zafu, the pseudo-altar where EVERYTHING is sacred, the chanting, the various mantras, and the handmade prayer beads from Thailand, the soothing music, the candles – all of it. I had to stop using all the structure and supposedly spiritual tools as my excuse for not sitting. I gave away almost my entire spiritual library and bought a blank journal. I set a kitchen timer, lay down on the floor of my office, put on headphones with a clip of a rainstorm off YouTube and closed my eyes for five minutes. I didn’t even focus on my breathing. I just enjoyed the sound of rain. When people ask me how to start a meditation practice I tell them to start with rain. It has to be the simplest, most addictive path to the cushion that I know.

As the years passed, and one journal grew into two and then five and the empty bookshelves of my spiritual library filled with my own writings, I learned many things, but a few are worth sharing here.

First and foremost, meditation is love. You are entering a space of love. Love for you, love within you, love free-floating in the ether.

Forget seeking enlightenment and knowledge. These are mostly intellectual constructs that your ego can and will fool you with. Awakening is not an event. It is a lifetime and then some of advancing vistas and rabbit holes of discovery. For every new view, more possibilities open up ahead. Awakening is adventure, not achievement.

Become love. Most of us can understand what it feels like to love something or to feel loved. Even if you believe you have never been loved or loved something yourself, I can assure you, that is an illusion. At the core of you is love; because that is all there is in this Universe: Love. Tear away galaxies and suns and love is still there pulsating with life. You do know this feeling and that feeling is an anchor in the silence. This thing you seek that gives you peace is familiar to you. You know it. It is no lofty mountaintop, but a rather common-looking door to a simple house full of warmth and invitation.

There are many reasons to sit, but I’d suggest this as the first: to feel life flowing through your veins and to revel in the feeling of air moving through your lungs. That breath is love. You will storm against this, you will rally your defenses to barricade it out, but alas, the lungs will pull it in again and again and there is little you can do about it. Thus, you learn over time to give in. To allow it to have its way with you and this is when it all gets really interesting.

Second, it’s okay not to be constantly working on yourself and trying to fix things. You don’t know it, but you aren’t broken. What you are letting go of is the idea that you are. Letting love have its way with you is about untethering the mind from its attachments to perfection or even holiness. Middle Age gallows have nothing on our mind’s ability to tear us down for not being good enough or worthy enough. It is truly insidious. Letting go, in this sense, is about no longer listening to your own mind. Letting go of believing it knows what it’s talking about, because it doesn’t. Much of what you think all day is learned behaviors and ideas of others or habituated thoughts based on reactions, most of which were created out of fear.

Your brain likes familiarity and predictability. It repeats things to keep your life familiar and predictable. Truth and happiness aren’t relevant to the brain. Neither truth nor happiness is your brain’s job. Your brain’s job is to keep you safe, and predictability and repetitiveness are brilliant ways to do that. In fact, the brain can’t identify the difference between an actual event and one you have fabricated. It reacts identically to both. As big a pill as it is to swallow, your brain is the least reliable source of information you’ve got going.

You are already enlightened, perfect and holy exactly as you are. There is nowhere that you are going. Nowhere to be. No destination of any kind. All the things you’ll learn will come from doing absolutely nothing. This isn’t the same as saying there is no activity. Sitting is an activity. Reflecting on what comes from your sit is an activity. It does mean though that it is a quiet and unstrained process. It is about accepting what appears, as opposed to endlessly digging like a badger for what needs to be ejected from our lives. Most of us are used to self-improvement vis a vis sledgehammers and backhoes. We think something is wrong with us and we want to root it out.

This nothingness is as counterintuitive to our thinking as to drive most of us sitting on that zafu insane. We are in such a Do-focused world. The idea of nothing has no root in our cultural heads. That’s as true for the devotee sitting in an ashram in India as it is for the Midwest farmer’s wife sitting on her rarely used living room sofa. We have a squirrely notion that goodness must come at a price. Love must come through effort. Worthiness must come through some external achievement. Meditation cleanses us of these ideas – eventually.

Personally, I sit to let go of the day’s events and reconnect with the deep well of love within me. From that well my whole life flows. I sit to fill my energy tanks and awaken my spirit. I sit to hear the sound of my own breath and feel appreciation for the life I live in its many forms. I sit to be alone with myself and love who I find there. I don’t sit to be spiritual, a better person or enlightened. I sit to remember I am already everything I thought I was seeking. There is nothing left for me to Do.

One of the things I’ve learned over the years is no two spiritual paths are alike. We all share many traits, but we each have to find our own way. What works for one person may not work for the next. There is also something immensely powerful about the hunger to not give up. With rare exception almost all of us begin our practices stumbling around in the dark, trying to find our way. We aren’t lazy and we aren’t lost. Spiritual journeys are simply crazy, messy, weird, unpredictable, sometimes disciplined, always beautiful rides. Wherever we are on them is always the exact right point for our personal evolution and we are never alone.

We may all come from different cultures, religions, races, and so on, but we all share in the human condition. We all hunger for love, safety, friendship, connection and peace. These are the things that bind us together. Through this bond we share in common spiritual experiences and the pieces you will find here explore those commonalities.

These pieces may be read before or after a sit. They are thematic and are intended to be food for thought to carry with you, not only in your sit, but throughout the day. Some will immediately resonate with you, while others may not; so take what serves you and feel free to leave the rest. You may read from front to back, but they can be read in any pattern you wish, with the exception of The Tethered and Untethered Boat in the BRANCH chapter. Those are two pieces best read one after the other. Otherwise, feel free to start the work at any point.

Everything in life is a cycle. From seed to plant to blossom and fruit that finally takes us back to seed. Wherever we jump in, is always the right part of the story, because it will all come round again.

Spiritual development is never a race. As I said, there is nowhere to get to and nowhere to be. Allowing concepts to roam the halls of your mind and heart is the best fertile ground to see what grows. You can’t hurry to enlightenment, because you are already there. There is no fast lane to mindfulness, because mindfulness is only found when we slow down. Every piece you absorb is like a lotus seed in the mud. You have to savor more, love more, and deeply appreciate the beauty within you more, to see it blossom on the still lake. So take your time. I will always be exactly where you left me – right here. Namaste.

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SEED

Small and dry

Do not be afraid of your hardness

Nothing from without can crack you

And nothing from within

Can stop you

Breaking

Open

1

Begin Again

Today, I send into your meditation to begin again.

There are not two more powerful words in all the world: Begin again. Begn otra vez. Start igen. もう一度を開始. Yeniden başlamak. Erneut beginnen. We put a lot of momentum into the life, practice, and disciplines we seek. Much hope and inspiration are given to our spiritual roads. When things go wrong in our lives and we respond in very human forms, we may feel we’ve fallen off the spiritual wagon. We act more out of ego than spirit, and like some cartoon character, we see ourselves face-planting into the dirt, with clouds of dust flying. It’s quite humbling when we lose our spiritual cool.

Begin again. دوبارہ شروع. Αρχίστε ξανά

Those words are like a get out of jail free card in Monopoly. They are the equivalent of great oak oars turning our canoe downstream. Begin again is a gift to the mind that has been mindlessly paddling upstream since we acted out. They are the force that lifts the mind out of churning on what has yet to be accomplished and offers a new start. It is an offering as potent at the age of seventy-eight as it was at seventeen.

Begin again. Iniziare di nuovo. Вновь начать.

No matter what is happening, how far you think you’ve fallen from the way, or lost yourself in ego-driven behaviors, you can always, always begin again.

2

Commitment

Today, I send into your meditation commitment.

We commit to what we love: a project, a lover, a fitness program. We commit to what we want