I meditated with my mother again today. It was a challenge. In my continuing effort to improve her breathing and thus lose her puttering cough, I instructed her to focus only on her inhalation and exhalations. The previous days she had been focusing on an image and a chosen phrase. I told her to breathe in relaxation, easily, effortlessly, re-clear the mind as she holds it for an easy moment, then exhale all tension, exhaling a bit longer than the inhale, so it’s as though she’s sinking deeper and deeper into calm. I practiced the same.
My parent’s dog began barking a few minutes into the session. He barks all the time. Someone came to the door with a package, the dog intensified his barking, I could hear my dad going to the front door, opening it, closing it, quieting the dog. I did my best to take my own advice and use any distraction as a lesson. I became aware, in between efforts to clear my head and simply breathe, that small needles of anxiety poked into my being with each bark, and each sound.
Afterward, my mother asked me if that session was difficult. She told me she had trouble because she wanted to tell the dog to stop. I told her about the anxiety needles, the thoughts that attempted to form with each poke, and the realization of the lack of legitimacy regarding the anxiety and associated thoughts.
The needles are the automatic default settings we’ve allowed our brains to strengthen over the years, but that’s all they are. They are bugs in the programming. My practice of meditation, and hers, is allowing us to become conscious of the bugs, letting the bugs burn up as though having approached a zapper, allowing us to ignore the needles like they are bouncing off a steel hull and falling away.
No matter what happens around us in the now, it does not change the core of who we are. Like trees with mighty trunks standing firm in a storm, some trees fall, others stand strong, rooted, solid. We are solid, rooted, strong, and tall. The wind does not enter us, it merely blows around us. Stress is wind and dust, we are the trees that remain standing in the aftermath of the storm.