Practitioner Reflection: Mind the Magician
In this post, Centre member Paul Buckingham reflects on the magic of meditation….
I love magicians. I loved them as a child, and I still do now, especially the ones that really leave me dumbfounded. The tricks I like best are those where the magician says something like, “I want you to focus on this coin” (she puts a coin on the table) “and let me know if you catch me moving it.” How hard could that be? All I have to do is keep watching. Obviously I’ll notice if the magician tries to move it. How could I possibly fail?
Yet every time, and seemingly without explanation, I find I’ve looked away briefly, only to look back and discover the coin is no longer there. I don’t know why I looked away, and I don’t know how the magician managed to move the coin without my noticing. Truly amazing.
Meditation is a little like this. The instruction is simple: Keep your focus on the breath. How hard could that be? Of course, we all know how hard that is. One moment the breath is forefront in our mind, but before we realize what’s happened we discover we’ve been on some flight of fancy, and it seems minutes since our attention was last on the breath.
But just as we delight in the sleight of hand of a magician, so too we can turn a sense of fun, in the form of a light inquisitiveness, to the magician in our mind. As we meditate, we can ask ourselves, “I wonder whether I can notice the exact moment my mind wanders from the breath, the precise point where some thought flits into consciousness?”
There’s a lightness to this approach, because we’re not berating ourselves for getting lost in thought. The game is different. Instead of punishing ourselves when we fail, we’re turning our curiosity to something fascinating: the magic show in our mind.
This may all sound like frivolity, but there’s something precious about the moment a thought enters the mind. It manages to take us unawares, despite our fondness for considering ourselves the authors of our thoughts. So when we pay attention to that moment, we grow closer to understanding how our minds truly behave. And with understanding comes gentleness—to our minds, and so to ourselves.
