Alice Walker has good advice for all of us who practice mindfulness meditation:

Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.

As a meditation teacher, I am happy when people describe feelings familiar from childhood resurfacing in meditation, such as waking up in the morning and feeling excited for no particular reason.

Causeless excitement about being alive bubbles up out of our true nature, and meditation practice is how we uncover it.

the delight of watching young children play

When our kids were little, my partner and I would delight in watching them play in the big yard at our old house. Our son spent hours in perpetual wonder, digging in the dirt, looking at bugs, playing with lizards and geckos.

We delight in the company of children because they remind us of our own wondrous capacity to be surprised and delighted. Mindfulness meditation lets us play in a kind of continual surprise, as we let go of that heavy know-it-all part of us and simply bask in the unfolding moment.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, the late Polish-born American professor of Jewish theology, had this to say:

An individual dies when they cease to be surprised. I am surprised every morning that I see the sunshine again. When I see an act of evil, I am not accommodated. I am still surprised. That is why I can hope against it. We must learn how to be surprised, not to adjust ourselves. I am the most maladjusted person in society.

be maladjusted

What a thing to say, that he is the most maladjusted person in society. Who, then, is maladjusted? Anyone, it seems, who is not drinking the Kool-Aid served by the media twenty-four hours a day.

Heschel is telling us we would do well to question the messages we receive on every channel, the ones subtly encouraging mediocrity and mindless consumerism. Luckily for us, mindfulness meditation carries its own channel of innocent delight and contentment.

As we sit quietly, contentment seeps into our being like the smell of pikake blossoms on the evening breeze.

to be spiritual is to be amazed

Heschel again:

Get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal, everything is incredible, never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.

Meditation helps us stay content and sane in a crazy world. Who exactly is maladjusted? Someone who is not content with life as it is. Genuine contentment is one of the more revolutionary acts available to a person in the twenty-first century; it runs against cultural norms and conditioning. 

which begs the question: what is this contentment, really?

For me, it is about being happy with who I am right now: overweight, under-exercised, and not looking forward to the hour-long drive home in morning traffic after a night shift.

Krista O’Reilly-Davi-Digui, a life coach, writes:

What if I just accept this mediocre body of mine that is neither big nor small, just in between. And I embrace that I have no desire to work for rock hard abs or eighteen percent body fat. And I make peace with it, and decide that when I lie on my deathbed, I will never regret having just been me.

What if all I really want is a small, slow, simple life. I used to feel quite depressed. A part of me was still consumed with fantasies and expectations: my kids, my marriage, my meditation practice, my night shift job, my, my, my, and “I” always fell short of them.

no regrets

What is maladjusted? Living a life of no regrets. I am much happier now, living out Krista O’Reilly-Davi-Digui’s line above: when I lie on my deathbed, I will never regret having just been me.

Nothing terribly dramatic happened. No huge epiphany. No burning bushes, no lights, sparks, or kundalini rush.

discover contentment here and now

Discovering contentment is a matter of letting go of these fantasies and realizing that life is truly amazing without them. Especially without them. It is about embracing my limitations without being defined by them. It is about taking some pleasure in being maladjusted.

As we quietly watch our fantasies arise and fall within mindful awareness, we see how powerfully they filter our perceptions, how they distort our view of things just as they are.

let thoughts come and go

We feel the relief of letting thoughts come and go. As psychologist Elisha Goldstein puts it, it is like standing at a laundromat watching the clothes tumble in a big dryer. We do not have to tumble along with the clothes.

We can just watch them fall through space.

The mind does not need to go blank. We only need a little distance from a thought so we stop tumbling along with it. As we let our thoughts pass through us, we start to see how incredible this life is, exactly as it is right now, this morning, sunshine again on the yard where the kids used to dig for geckos.

Further reading

• sit quietly and observe your thoughts
• chocolate comes, chocolate goes
• leaving things undone