Sit! Stay!

This morning I awoke with a vivid dream stuck in my head. Rather than search for meaning, I searched for a way that it might morph into a blog.  So, butt firmly planted in Lazygirl, coffee in hand, I settle in to my quiet time to contemplate, meditate, and write.  Aha!  I’ve got it!  Blog it is.

In my dream, my friends and I return from an outing.  They are in the front seat, and I am in the back behind the driver.  We park, they get out, leave the engine running, and walk away.  I am trapped in the back, the victim of the child’s safety lock.  I bang on a window, frantically trying to get their attention.  No luck.  They are gone.  I can only hope that before long, they will realize that I am missing.

I wondered how they would forget all about me, but there were bigger things to fret about.  What am I going to do?  I try to reach the front seat to turn off the engine, but can’t, and my phone is out of reach.  I’m locked in a seat belt that will not release me, trapped in a car with the engine running.  I’m hopelessly stuck, resigned to my fate.  Perhaps I’ll be dead by morning.  Eventually, my friends realize that I am missing, and come to find me.  Happily, I’m still alive.

In my interpretation of this dream, the car represents my body and the interior is my mind, trapped inside of my body.  My mind perceives itself as being locked in, hopelessly inprisoned, helpless, abandoned, forgotten, and resigned to my fate.  My mind is engaged in a fruitless attempt to escape from my body.

Last night, I watched the fourth segment of Rewired, a video series by Dr. Joe Dispenza, a neuroscientist, available on Gaia.com.  The segment was about meditation.  I confess that my decades of experience as a meditator is sketchy at best, but after watching Dr. Joe last night, something clicked, and I finally got it.  Meditation is the key to escaping lock-down.  Somehow, he managed to remove all traces of my failed meditation history and filled the void with new awareness.  It only took how many years?

According to Dr. Dispenza, our brains serve up a mind-boggling sixty to seventy thousand thoughts every day, many of which are unconscious.  Those thoughts are programmed into our subconscious minds and can drive our behavior whether we are aware of it or not.  The purpose of meditation is to divorce the mind from analytical thinking and thoughts of the past and future in order to reach a point of being in the present moment.  Practice, man.  Practice.

Here’s the great aha as it relates to my dream.  Those thousands of thoughts harbored in my subconscious mind are unlocked through meditation and set free, allowing my mind to escape the prison of past thoughts of feeling like a helpless victim trapped in a fruitless attempt to escape the circumstances in which I am held captive.

Dr. Joe emphasizes that meditation is a mind training.  I knew that.  I just flunked the course.  Just as in intensive puppy training, it is important to burn the command, “sit stay”  in the brain.  Sit in silence, turn off the analysis button, dismiss thoughts of the past and future, forget what’s on the daily to-do list, and stay in the present moment that is now.  We can always trip off into past and future later if we insist.  Just not during meditation.

So in the end, it’s Dr. Joe who turns out to be the real hero in this story.  He’s the guy with the meditation techniques that provide the key to get me out of the car and send me off into a spanking clean, sparkling shiny new now.  Thanks, Doc.  I needed that.

Sit!  Stay!

Note:  The photo above is courtesy of New Waves of Light, a website designed by anonymous individuals around the world who share the intention of bringing light and love to a world of darkness and chaos. (newwavesoflight.org or NWOL.us).