Wandering

Collage credit: Marianne Møllmann

This morning I tried a new meditation method called “choiceless awareness”. The principle is simple: you follow every distracting thought down its proverbial rabbit-hole, until you are distracted by another thought which you also then follow. In short: you allow your mind to wander. The goal is to limit the impact of distractions by humouring them, much like you might mitigate the impact of a fall by diving into it.

The results were illuminating.

At first, as I sat down, it felt like I was at a confusing junction with various potential trailheads. I could feel my mind spinning as I might at a real multi-armed fork in the road: is this the right way? Or this one? Or maybe this other one that beckons just out of sight? As usual, it took 10 minutes for my mind to reach a place of calm — a state which this method sometimes calls intrinsic completeness, where the calm of the mind co-exists with the bustle of the world.

Habits are hard to break. I am used to pushing distractions gently away, and so allowing myself to follow them felt indulgent, even wrong. Surely, I am sitting to understand what happens when I don’t distract myself. Wouldn’t this method counter the purpose?

But the more I just allowed my thoughts to do what they wanted to do, the more I relaxed into the process. The distractions started feeling like distributaries flowing from a river towards wherever they were needed most. The topics I usually spend the most time pushing away felt like unhelpful anchors, tethering me to my past, rather than the big world out there. They were somehow easier to dismiss like this, because I didn’t really dismiss them at all. They were just uninteresting and so I followed another more promising route. Some distributaries led nowhere special, others reached a lake or plateau I would otherwise have missed.

There is important learning in this, I think. Something about freedom and unpredictability and room, something about needing to be in this world even as I sit. I will be starting at the multiple trailheads again one of these days. Soon.