It May Seem Tough, but Meditation Is Your Gateway to Freedom

We all have a psychological box. A box that we use quite frequently. We use it for storing all those thoughts, emotions, and feelings that we do not want to experience.

Over the course of our lives, we work towards making this box stronger and stronger. We keep stuffing it with our resentments, guilts, fears, frustrations, and the likes.

Now, this box keeps getting heavier and heavier. Since we are carrying it in our psyche, we keep shouldering its burden throughout our lives.

This burden is reflected in the actions and the choices that we make in any given situation. This box is what constitutes our conditioning.

We go to lengths to make sure that this box doesn’t get disturbed. But life has its ways and it does get disturbed.

This unsettles us. We start resenting people and situations that disturb our box. We blame them for the internal suffering that we experience, not realizing the reason for our misery is stored within us.

This is the normal way of living for most of us.

The practice of meditation brings us face to face with this box.

As we begin our practice, this box starts to crumble.

For some it happens slowly, for some, it happens quite fast.

This is the reason why many of us feel that we have become extra sensitive to our emotions and feelings once we start to embrace the practice of mindfulness wholeheartedly.

Now, sitting through this could be quite hard for some of us, especially for those for whom the box is crumbling at a faster rate.

Coming face to face with all the thoughts, emotions, and feelings that we have had bottled up for a long time, could be a difficult process at first. But this process is necessary if we are to become free of our conditioning.

This is where all our false ideas about the practice of meditation fall away. We realize that it is not just a bed of roses, but there are some thorns too.

But the irony is this, as we continue our practice, as we continue to sit through these thoughts and emotions as they come up, without reacting to them, the thorns just fall away.

This is the falling away of our ego and the emergence of our true selves.

So if life has brought you to the practice of meditation, recognize that it is your gateway to freedom. Freedom for your psychological box of suffering.

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Check out this post by Jasmine Abriel where she talks about the incredible power of mindful solitude and how it helped her come face to face with her internal thought process.