“Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.”
What a great quote from Pema Chodron.
I was faced with a forty minute motorcycle ride that I was, clothing-wise, totally unprepared for. By the time I got home I knew I’d be freezing. So I decided to try an experiment.
For the entire forty minutes, I’d be aware of every breath. Specifically, on the inhalation, I’d visualize the air coming in through the top of my head; on the exhalation, I’d imagine the air going down my legs and out through my feet.
Each time a thought crept in—I caught it immediately—which effortlessly returned my attention to breathing. About twenty-five minutes into the ride a phenomenal experience occurred—I was no longer cold at all. I was actually warm and comfortable.
When I arrived, I was so shocked at how warm I was and how much fun I was having, I rode around the desert for another half an hour… And I couldn’t have been any happier. (Street-legal XR-600.)
I used to wonder why a Rinzai Zen meditation period is twenty-five minutes. That is no longer a mystery.
Give your full attention to a specific activity for twenty-five minutes, and it might change everything about how you live.
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“Hold onto the sense of ‘I am’ to the exclusion of everything else. When thus the mind becomes completely silent, it shines with a new light and vibrates with new knowledge. It all comes spontaneously, you need only hold on to the ‘I am’.” -Nisargadatta Maharaj