Perspective
From what perspective do you typically watch what is happening in your life? How does meditation affect standpoint?
I’ve noticed that when new people come to something familiar, that recurring event looks and feels different, because they bring their perspective.
I often experience something similar with my husband or a friend. We will be talking and I will bring out one of my ‘snow globes’ (in this brief clip Mae Martin brilliantly and humorously explains their snow globe theory of human interaction), and my husband or friend will have a totally different take on it than my comfortably familiar one.
Huh!
Meditation can have a similar effect. The hum and chatter of thoughts in my head normally just went on and on without me much ‘seeing’ it, really, before I meditated regularly. It was the water I swam in. Nothing to see here, move along.
But each time I meditate is an opportunity to step aside out of that habitual babbling stream of thoughts. The mind gets quiet, and loud, and quiet again.
Perspective shifts.
When strong feelings rise, or in the midst of a frantic day, it’s easy to get swept away, to lose a sense of that internal ‘Watcher’. But it doesn’t go away, and meditation practice strengthens the felt and experienced connection over time.
In her book The Heart of Centering Prayer, Cynthia Bourgeault says this:
“In various traditions the witness has been identified with “Real I,” “the true self,” and “essential being,” but all of this naming misses the point. Witnessing is, if anything, a verb: an innate capacity of human consciousness to be present to itself as a field of awareness. Though personal, it is not a person—not an other—but a subtle capacity of consciousness itself, so far as we know gifted to the human species alone. Its purpose seems to be to keep track simultaneously of the horizontal axis—our life in time—and the pure divine awareness that is always intersecting this axis.”
Goodreads Cynthia Bourgeault quotes
This makes me think of the Hebrew word that comes up a fair bit in the Psalms.
Selah.
סֶלָה
This online article provides an example of its use and how it illustrates what it can do in our spiritual lives:
‘Let’s take a look at Psalm 46, a psalm written in the midst of chaos and uncertainty:
“God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble. Therefore, we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea…” Selah
Psalm 46:1–3
These verses declare God’s strength and our security in Him—even when the world feels like it’s falling apart. Then comes Selah; a pause – a sacred breath. It’s as if the psalmist is saying, “Let that truth settle in and before you keep going, let your heart absorb it.” Isn’t that what we so often need —not just more words, but space for those words to take root?’
I believe this kind of pause allows for that shift of perspective, out of the usual internal chatter, to a place of stillness and clarity.
I guess what I’m trying to say if you are just starting a meditation practice, and finding it frustrating, or if you have been trying off and on for a while, but struggling to establish regularity, there can be real value and depth in persevering, for this and many other important reasons.