After sitting the refresher course I didn’t think I would feel so good again. During the meditation nothing particularly amazing or unusual occurred so I almost didn’t think it was working. I was able to achieve more levels of deeper concentration, and sustain it longer. I felt the bleeding feeling throughout my back of stress and attachments coming lose through much of the course, which I've learned to take as a sign that things are getting better. But I was expecting some crazy shit to happen like the previous time and that really didn’t occur. There was no epiphany, there was no hallucinations. So for some reason I took this to mean that it hadn’t really worked and that the practice had lost its magic on me. Eh, not a complete loss, I probably de-stressed a bit, the food was good, and it was better than a weekend catching up on season whatever of whatever show.
I couldn’t be more wrong. While I fully realized there were
consequences to what the practice could provide, I had always been very critical and skeptical about its
application and benefit to me once I had returned to the real world. Since
I had no plans of becoming a monk and that I have things to do in the real world I
needed a system which would actually help me here.
It was upon returning to the real world where all the
benefits of my weekend of hard work were realized. Part of the meditation teaches you to
control your reactions. That instead of going through this unconscious cycle of
reacting one can cut it off before that happens and this will help avoid misery. When one encounter senses, the body has built up a series of reactions to these sensory inputs, conditioning. I'll show you. When a
mosquito lands on you, you are trained to swat at it without really thinking
about it. There is a sensory perception of feeling the mosquito land on you somewhere, this is usually enough to alert your conscience, followed
by a built in evaluation of good or bad, then an emotional and physical
response. In the case of the mosquito it goes, there’s a mosquito on my arm
(perception), this is a bad thing (evaluation), I’m stressed, annoyed, and
worried it’s going to bite me and suck my blood which will leave some swelling and itch for a while, and I may get West Nile Virus (emotional response), I’m going to smack it
hoping to kill it but at worst it will go away for the moment (physical
response). While one mosquito isn’t going to ruin your day unless it has West Nile Virus, it does leave most everyone noticeably cross for a short period of time, and if that happened
every five minutes for an entire day it would definitely start to take its toll. That
stress you incur from the one mosquito when multiplied by a large number
becomes a significant amount of stress. That can certainly affect your mood, and you might be left wondering why you don't feel better at the end of the day. Modern life isn't swarms of mosquitoes but there are many little stressors which can build up throughout the day. Maybe it’s a beep on your phone each time you
get a new message which indicates another obligation that could be stressing you out. It could be the way
somebody talks to you. It could be the way that other people drive you feel is
adversely affecting you. Many of these things you can't really control. When all these things happen on a daily basis it can
aggregate into unhappiness.
