For the past several months, I’d mostly avoided focusing on the breath when meditating because it has felt claustrophobic. But today, when I meditated lying down, it felt okay, even anchoring and center to do so.
I’m not sure why. Perhaps it has to do with the community we’re creating together. But, then again, there are a number of good things that have happened in my life the last few days (good news about a paper I had submitted, about family dynamics and our new babysitter, and about my piano playing), and it’s tempting to attribute them to meditating with a firm intention. Not all of them can really be the result of the community, however valuable it is. This tendency to believe that what when good things happen, they happen as a result of something I’m doing – isn’t that magical thinking, and isn’t it another place where narcissistic identifications occur?
Comments
Breathing meditations
Breathing meditations sometimes make me feel clausterphobic too.
Funny, I was recently discussing something similar. When things go "bad" in our lives, we like to blame God (or however we express it). But when things are "good" we like to think we've created that or that we deserve it. That's why I like to think about equanimity -- not good or bad, but just one moment to the next.
Katie