Returning To Center
Surely we’ve all have times like this? When you sit down to relax or practice a little meditation, you close your eyes and almost immediately your mind drifts back to the past, recalling or remembering things. Or it goes forward to the future, imagining, anticipating or planning. And even though you’re not physically doing anything, you still feel busy, albeit in your mind. Few!
This is in part what the philosopher Wu Hsin means when he says:
‘Too much time is squandered
on what was and what will be,
leaving only table scraps
for What Is.’
And so, What Is? What Is?
Now there’s an interesting question to take on.
I’m prepping a tennis inspired meditation workshop for a client and their team later this week, and for our notes I like to use this tennis image as a metaphor for coming back to the present moment.
In tennis lessons you come back to the middle of base line again and again. This way you’re best placed to return the next ball which could be headed to either side of the court. And I liken that to coming back to the now or to the center.
Are you following the tennis this year?
Have you found parallels between mindfulness and sports?
Images: illustrations by Charlene Mann, from my meditation book ‘Inhale. Exhale. Repeat’
