Focused Pine Cone Meditation

my meditation alter

Since the Life Extension Conference I've been practicing meditation more regularly.  The type I've been doing has been pretty active on watching the breath and staying very focused on that without exploring much mind chatter.

Today I did something different, I know that I have a few things that I'm focusing on that are challenging and I wanted to sit with them more specifically.  I was drawn to the pine cone on my alter as a symbol of nascent possibilities.  

I held the pine cone in my seated position and it felt really refreshing to have something in my hands to draw my attention.  I closed my eyes and started to explore some areas that I've found challenging -- which, though I don't want to get into here, mainly have to do with resisting being self-expressed in a couple areas.

As I drew by thoughts out from the last few days, I could see my mind drifting around and I could ask myself how these thoughts were related to the pine cone.

I thought of birth -- maybe challenges can be viewed as something that can be birthed through.  Uncomfortable, challenging, and scary -- I imagined a newborn not liking the sensations of being pushed through the canal into a completely new world.   That said, without this first challenge, nothing greater would be known. 

Babies do not resist this process, there is no scrambling to get back in.  They're soft and pliable and accept the push that is given.  When I look at my challenges a big thing that I can see is a scrambling to move away from the contraction.  I spoke yesterday about how my inner five year old just wanted to stomp on the floor and have a temper tantrum because the challenge was too confronting, too hard, and something that I've tried at many many times and not succeeded at.  It's all resistance and fight.

I wondered what challenges would be like if I did not resist them, if I let the contractions move over me.  Surely the process would be uncomfortable however worthwhile in the end.  It seems to me that if I don't face them now, that they will just keep coming up until a bigger push comes along.  The choice is to go through it or bury it for later.

Carl Jung continues to pop up for me, "That which you resist, persists."  And I can see that I've been resisting not only going through these challenges but experiencing the emotions that go along with them. 

I thought of what it would be like to go from having challenges with resistance to moments of "isn't that fascinating" with curiosity and wonder to life's contractions.  I think that going head on with the latter would be wonderful, and I know that I'm much closer to really knowing that going through the challenge is what's most important right now...maybe the step after that is to cultivate challenges into fascinating moments.