Befriend your monkey mind. That's it. That could be the entire
essay: befriend your monkey mind.
Implicit in all the injunctions "Calm your monkey
mind", "Control your monkey mind",
"Quiet
your monkey mind", "Tame your monkey mind" is the faux
certainty that you're
best served
by calming your monkey mind and / or by controlling it and / or by
quieting
it and / or by taming it. Look: wise people,
yogis,
and siddhas over the ages have touted ingenious ways
to calm, control,
quiet,
and tame it. I may not be a wise person or a
yogi
or a siddha, but for now I'd like you to try this on:
"Befriend your monkey mind" in lieu of all the above.
See what that's like. Try it on for size. You can always discard it
later.
Befriend it. Let it be. Welcome it the way it is. Stop
futzing with it. It's doing its job, and it's doing it
well. Ironically, if you befriend it / let it be / welcome it /
stop futzing with it, it's likely to calm down and
quieten
all by itself.
Consider:
peace of mind
comes from befriending your monkey mind, from allowing it to be,
not from trying to control it. Gee, I really want you to get that!
I assert trying to control your monkey mind whose very nature is to
be uncontrollable, is as
futile
as it is foolish.
Zazen
is
a sitting meditative
discipline
that's typically the primary practice of the Zen
Buddhist
tradition
[source:
wikipedia].
If you're going to do
Zazen
properly, you'll bring your already
peace
/ OK-ness / Zen to your monkey mind, rather than trying to calm /
control /
quiet
/ tame your monkey mind in order to get Zen. Zen
Buddhists
let all things be just the way they are (it's essentially a tenet
of Zen
Buddhism).
Zen
Buddhists
let their monkey mind be the way it is because it is that
way. Trying to calm / control /
quiet
/ tame your monkey mind in
Zazen
(or any
form of
meditation
for that matter) is just not good Zen.
Somewhere (no one knows whence) you got the notion that
something's wrong
with your monkey mind, which therefore needs to be (or should be)
calmed, controlled,
quieted,
and / or tamed. If you asked me, I'd say that's about as ridiculous
as the idea that
something's wrong
with
your heart
and its pulsating beat, which needs to be (or should be) calmed,
controlled,
quieted,
and / or tamed. The thing is there's really nothing wrong with your
monkey mind exactly the way it is. That's the way it works. It doesn't need
fixing.
That's its design. It's fine, perfectly
A-OK just the way it is. Leave it alone. Get out of
its way.
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