Oakville Zen Meditation
Our mind is always in a permanent state of starving for something from “not having enough,” always greedy for more food such as thoughts, and feelings to think about, and even having the body doing something. Therefore, if you are controlled by your mind most of the time, you can get bored and restless very easily.
Being bored is having a restless body-mind telling you that your self-image is affected negatively if you don’t keep yourself busy.
So, what to do?
1)You can stay bored and restless, but being bored is a negative emotion that the ego
hates because he wants to show off a busy self-image.
How often do you reply to someone: “ I am doing OK, ….busy, rather than
I am doing OK, doing nothing”...being bored.
Being bored is not a good social image to expose to others.
Besides: dealing with a negative emotion such as being bored consumes a
lot of positive energy and makes you tired of doing nothing.
2) When you feel bored or boredom coming, you immediately satisfy your mind’s
appetite by reading, googling, texting, shopping, workout, traveling, gaming,
food. etc.
The list is endless but never 100% satisfying because not dealing with the source.
3) Or you can bring your awareness and acceptance of being bored.
How to achieve this? By meditating on your boredom in a mindful way that is no
analytic, no decision to be made. “ I have boredom right now and it is OK”.
Slowly thru the practice of awareness and acceptance, some space and stillness
will appear. The need to do something right away will fade out.
A sense of inner peace will be grown, and the negative feeling of boredom
will begin to melt. You will discover that “the bored person” is not who you are.
Again, boredom is just an ego-driven mind telling you “ I want to do something
because I am an important person caring about my self-image to keep it busy”.
Like any other feelings such as anger, fear, etc. boredom is an emotional mental
condition that you have but it is not you.
Nothing that comes and goes all the time such as thoughts and feelings is you
because the genuine you or true self always remains stable as she/he is.
You cannot be the “bored one” and be the observer of that boredom at the same
time. Put in different words: you cannot observe A and be A at the same time.
This is the secret of practicing mindful awareness, an exciting skill to practice.
boredom. TX
