Imagine a glass of muddy water. You want it clear, so your instinct is to do something — stir it, swirl it, give it a poke. Because that's how everything else works. Effort in, result out.

Except that's the one attitude that keeps it muddy. The water clears when you set the glass down and leave it completely alone.

That's the thing almost everyone gets wrong when they first come to me — and I got it wrong for years myself, so I get it.

People arrive convinced they're bad at meditation. "My mind won't switch off." "I'm hopeless at it." Sixty seconds on the train and — narp, not for me.

I understand it completely, because I stirred as hard as anyone.

I tried so hard to quiet my mind, or at least to make it behave — to have better thoughts, nicer ones, more enlightened ones … you understand?

We're all taught that meditation means clearing the mind, concentrating harder, getting rid of the thoughts, becoming calm, becoming better. So a busy mind looks like failure.

But a busy mind isn't a sign you're doing it badly. It's a sign you have a mind.

And a mind that's been stirred up for, ooh, a few decades was never going to settle in sixty seconds. It settles by being left alone — not by being worked on.

That's what took me years to see: the problem was never that the water was muddy. It was that I kept fiddling with it. Even trying to do it "right" is just more fiddling.

And when you finally find a way to leave the mind alone, you get it: peace isn't something you manufacture, it’s what's there once you stop.

The practice I teach — Ascension — is a reliable way of setting the glass down. Not a faster way to clear the water, but the opposite: a way of finally stopping the stirring you never quite knew you were doing.

It's taught over a weekend, because that's long enough for the mud to genuinely settle and for you to see what's been underneath the whole time. Coming home, people say.

It's never about effort. That's the bit almost nobody believes walking in, and everybody knows walking out.

So — what have you been stirring harder and harder, hoping it'll clear, when all it's waiting for is for you to set it down?

As always, go well,
Arjuna

PS.

Come along —

Next Ascension course is 3-5 July (7pm start).

Full details and booking: https://www.arjunaishaya.com/ishayasascension

Or reply to this. I’d love to chat, answer any questions, however I can help.

Talk soon!