Last Saturday, as with virtually every Saturday for the last eight years, I woke up with the intention that I would not do any work of any kind - no email, no talking about work, no thinking about work issues - until Monday morning. My kids and their friend who'd had a sleepover awoke at 5:40am, dressed up in camo costumes, and began playing the loudest game of Secret Agent I'd ever heard. I clearly wasn't going to get back to sleep, so I stumbled the twelve steps from my bed to our closet, pulled my cushion off the shelf above my shoes, and plunked myself down for my morning meditation.
To me, meditation is not about stopping all thoughts and insisting on a warm honey-like love syrup circumambulating my spinal column. Ideally, meditation is about surrendering control more than increasing control. Control is what the mind is seeking in virtually every waking moment. It wants to be more secure, happy, still, and positive.
But as I sat there and meditated this morning, I watched the thoughts arising with their little pleas of "Follow me, I can make you happier." And most of them were about my work, notwithstanding my commitment to have a day free of any professional toil or thought.
Why was this? As I evaluated the content of the thoughts themselves, I noticed that most of them were just continuations of the thoughts I'd been having Monday through Friday of this week. There was a momentum to my thinking, a sled track that I'd been skimming down all week, and now, sitting on the top of the hill and hoping to go down a different path, the well-worn tracks of my week were sending me careening past all-too-familiar scenery. Why had I expected anything different?
One of my favorite poets is Rumi, and one of his poems says "Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened. Don't open the door to the study and begin reading." I feel as though I'm waking up and even before the experience of empty or frightened hits my conscious mind, my thoughts are all about avoiding 'empty and frightened.' The 'study' I'm opening the door to is my business life and all its strategies for achievement and meaning.
The thought arises "I've got too much to do in the limited amount of time available." All last week, I believed that thought. And I would feel a constant sense of being behind the eight-ball, unable to catch up. I so badly wanted to be able to complete things almost as fast as I thought of them. "I've got this to do and that to do and oh yeah, there's still those four things from this morning."
And then, in the midst of my yoga practice, I realized that this too is just a thought; a thought with no more and no less value than many other thoughts. The only thing which gave it a sense of urgency was itself.
With that realization, all my to-do's for today suddenly lost their urgency. I asked myself "what happens if I don't get fully prepared for the review I'm conducting?" The answer was "Nothing, we'll just reschedule it."
"And what happens if I don't get my blog written in time?" Again, "Nothing, it will just post a little later."
Then my mind raised the stakes. "And what if the stock market is down 500 points today and three clients call to say they just can't take it anymore and are leaving?" I realized I'd lose some money, and possibly have to make some strategic decisions to keep the company financially sound, but the level of life-and-death fear which accompanies my usual to-do urgency was gone. None of these were life-or-death.
But my most repetitive thoughts about money, what I call the "Financial Core Story" in my book, do have a sense of urgency about them. From a very young part of myself, this Core Story believes that if I 'get it all done', I'll accumulate enough money to never have to worry again, never be abandoned by a father or stepfather, and be secure for the rest of my days. This is one of the refrains of the Saver, one of the eight financial money types. As I sat there in the early morning hours, the roosters just beginning their usual call, I wondered how I could get some relief from this endless litany of inner demands. Just then, it dawned on me that what I most need is the financial money type I'm most resistant to, the one I've lived out least of all: the Innocent . I needed to surrender all this need for control. I needed, in that moment, to have faith that whether I fulfill all the to-do's or not, life will work out as it should, the refrain of the Innocent.
With that realization, my shoulders dropped a quarter inch and my jaw unclenched ever so slightly. I felt deeply peaceful for the first time in days. That which I had most resisted throughout the week had become my very salvation. And I saw more clearly than ever before the grace and peace which can come from embodying that which I've avoided for so very long.
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Brent Kessel is the author of the HarperCollins book, It's Not About the Money (forthcoming April 1st), and the co-founder of Abacus, one of the nation's top sustainable investing firms. Brent is teaching his It's Not About the Money workshop over Easter weekend at Kripalu.