The TRUTH behind your 'SPIRITUAL JOURNEY' and you may not like it!
Is my meditation even working? Toad read poems to his seeds and played them music, and they still would not grow. That is most of us, most of the time.
Is my meditation even working? Toad read poems to his seeds and played them music, and they still would not grow. That is most of us, most of the time.
A 1972 wine sits in a vat for years and nobody stands over it demanding progress. Everything you have built up, every opinion and belief, has to break down before anything grows. Forcing a seed does not work, and neither does forcing yourself to let go. Toad suffers because he wants something from it. The practice leads to less suffering, not to a prize.
One thing to try: Stop checking whether it is working. That checking is the thing getting in the way.
In this episode
(0:01) Is my meditation working? Is my practice working?
(2:12) Toad reading poems to his seeds, and playing them music
(4:42) The 1972 wine, and how long it actually takes
(6:42) Everything built up over the years has to break down
(9:02) Becoming attached to our own city of beliefs
(11:09) Forcing the seed, and forcing yourself to let go
(13:08) Toad suffers because he wants something from it
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Thank you for listening.
Steven
The question this answers
Is my meditation actually working?
I get asked this constantly, and the best answer I have is a children's story about a toad shouting at seeds.
The heart of it
You are not creating anything. Everything you are after is already there, underneath what you built on top of it.
Forcing a seed does not work, and neither does forcing yourself to let go.
The practice leads to less suffering. Sitting down in order to get less suffering is still wanting something.
The story is Arnold Lobel's, from Frog and Toad, and I read the whole of it at the start of the episode. Toad is given seeds and wants a garden immediately. He shouts at the ground. Frog tells him the seeds are frightened of all the noise and to leave them be.
So Toad concludes they are frightened of the dark and takes candles out. He reads them a long story. He sings to them. He reads them poems. He plays them music.
Eventually he falls asleep, and while he is asleep the seeds come up.
That is most of us, most of the time.
There is a winery in France where the grapes go into a vat, into the ground, and stay there twenty years. Imagine taking that to a bank. What will you be doing meanwhile? Nothing. Waiting.
Meditation is terrible business sense and that is rather the point.
Now what you are actually doing. Picture yourself at birth as an empty field. Shoots come up. You learn what you like, so tents go up, then huts, then concrete, and eventually there is a city there. That city is everything you take yourself to be. Your opinions, your job, your story about yourself.
And you defend it. Somebody disagrees with a building and you take it personally, because you have mistaken the architecture for the ground.
Underneath the city, the field is still there. That is what the practice uncovers, and uncovering is slow work that nobody can hurry.
The pink elephant proves it. Tell somebody to stop thinking about one and ring them daily to ask how they are getting on.
One small thing to try
Sit without wanting anything from it.
Ken Wilber was asked how you know it is working. He joked that you will spend more time alone and find dating considerably harder. Then he said the real answer: you will feel things more deeply and suffer less.
Spiritual development is not an accomplishment, but a way of life.
David Hawkins
Plant the seeds and be genuinely all right if none of them come up.
Questions people ask
So how do I tell if it is working?
Not by how the sitting felt. By whether you are feeling more and suffering less over months, and whether things that would have flattened you last year no longer do.
Am I supposed to have no goals?
Have them. Just notice when the wanting has become the obstacle. Toad's problem was never the seeds. It was that he needed them to have grown by Tuesday.
Why is a children's book the best explanation?
Because it does not flatter you. Nobody reads it and thinks Toad is being wise, and everybody recognises themselves in him about four minutes later.
Read along
The transcript
It follows the audio. Press any line to jump there.
spiritual-journey · acceptance · mindfulness
Read the transcript
One of the questions I get asked quite a lot is, is my meditation
working?
Is my spiritual practice working?
I think this is a brilliant story to illustrate the spiritual
journey and how it works.
While Frog was in his garden, Toad came walking by.
What a fine garden you have, Frog.
Yes, said Frog.
It's very nice, and it was hard work.
I wish I had a garden, said Toad.
Here are some flower seeds.
Plant them in the garden, said Frog, and soon you will have a garden.
How soon?
Said Toad.
Quite soon.
Toad ran home.
He planted the flower seeds.
Now seeds, said Toad, start growing.
Toad walked up and down a few times.
The seeds did not grow.
Toad put his head close to the ground and said loudly, now seeds
start growing.
Toad looked at the garden again.
The seeds did not start to grow.
Toad put his head very close to the ground and shouted, now seeds
start growing.
Frog came running up the path.
What is all the noise?
My seeds will not grow, said Toad.
You are shouting too much, said Toad.
These poor seeds are afraid to grow.
My seeds are afraid to grow.
Of course, said Frog.
Leave them alone for a few days.
Let the sun shine on them.
Let the rain fall on them.
Soon the seeds will start to grow.
That night, Toad looked out the window.
Drat.
Said Toad.
My seeds have not started to grow.
They must be afraid of the dark.
Toad went out to his garden with some candles.
I will read the seeds a story, said Toad.
Then they will not be afraid.
Toad read a really long story to his seeds.
All the next day, Toad sang songs to his seeds.
And all the next day, Toad read poems to his seeds.
And all the next day, Toad played music for his seeds.
Toad looked at the ground.
The seeds still did not grow.
What shall I do?
Cried Toad.
These must be the most frightened seeds in the whole world.
Then Toad felt very tired, and he fell asleep.
Toad, Toad, wake up, said Frog.
Look at your garden.
Toad looked at his garden.
Little green plants were coming up out of the ground.
At last.
Shouted Toad.
My seeds have stopped being afraid to grow.
And now you will have a nice garden too, said Frog.
Yes, said Toad.
But you are right, Frog.
It was very hard work.
I love that story.
I'm Stephen Webb, and this is living Deeper Lives.
And I share that story because this is our spiritual practice.
This is meditation.
This is the desire to grow.
It takes time.
It takes patience.
It takes nurturing.
And sometimes we just have to allow the process to happen.
The thing is, with meditation, we sit down and we try to make it
a good meditation.
We try to stop thinking.
We try to create the perfect inner Peace.
And that's not what meditation is about.
Meditation is not about creating anything.
It's about letting go and allowing things to be what they are.
In this story, Toad was working so hard to get the seeds
to grow because he had all the expectations that he wanted a garden.
Right now he was sitting in meditation expecting it to work.
He was sitting there wanting and longing and needing these seeds
to grow, to have this wonderful garden.
In doing that, he was suffering.
Meanwhile, he had no idea the seeds weren't frightened.
The seeds were doing what they have to do.
They patience, they take time.
Anything like this, anything worthwhile, takes time to grow.
You know, anybody that has a brewery.
Or anybody that's made beer at home knows these things.
You know, some of the finest wines take longer.
That's why we look at these things.
And it takes so many years.
This is like a 1972 fine wine.
There's a winery in France somewhere that.
They, they put all the grapes into.
A big vat, I think it's called.
And they bury it in the ground.
And it stays there for 20 years.
Yeah, I have that right, 20 years.
And then they dig it up and then they bottle it and sell it.
And I often think, I wonder how many employees never get to dig
up the one that they plant or the one they put under the ground.
And it might seem like real bad business sense.
Just imagine going to the bank and saying to them, I'm going to
start a winery.
And they go, okay, brilliant, yes.
I'm going to get my grapes together and I'm going to put them
in a vat and I'm going to put.
Them in the ground.
And then in 20 years time, I'm going to get it out and I'm going
to sell this fine wine for a lovely prophet.
I said, well, what are you going to do in the 20 years?
Well, nothing.
I'm just going to wait.
Meditation is not about good business sense.
It's not about wanting something to be different to what
it is.
Meditation is about accepting an awareness of what things are.
And that's the spiritual journey.
The spiritual practice, the journey within is.
Not to create anything.
You're not creating enlightenment, knowledge or wisdom.
It's all there already.
You already have all these things.
You're not creating a wonderfully, spiritually enlightened
human.
You are already that.
It's about undoing everything that has been done to us.
Our experiences in life, our opinions and beliefs, everything
that has built up over the years needs to be broken down.
And you imagine when you're born you're like a blank field.
There's no grass, there's no anything.
Nothing has grown yet.
And then over time, over the months, you see some shoots growing.
And then as time goes on, we learn about what we like and dislike
and we start planting our tents and our huts and then we build
these opinions into beliefs and we start building concrete houses.
And we start building concrete houses and suddenly this landscape
and then suddenly this landscape is full of this big city.
Well, that city is our ego.
It's who we are.
It's who I am.
It's my thoughts, my opinions, my experiences.
My stories, the story I tell people.
The person I become when it comes to my I'm a doctor or I'm a
worker or nurse or I'm an accountant or any of those other
things.
All of these things parent is all.
Part of this big, big city.
And while we're trying to protect that city from anybody else
coming in and planting their city, we don't realize this city
that we built in our minds, this, this neuro network is really
just a combination of everybody else's and our experiences.
And meditation is about recognizing that this is just something
we've built.
And below that is a fertile wisdom.
An experience that goes beyond our limits of our opinions and beliefs.
And there's a freedom and there's the unconditional love, there's
the acceptance below all of this that we create in our minds.
And this is where the attachment comes in.
When we become attached to our city, when we become attached to
our beliefs and opinions and all these neural networks, we get
offended if someone disagrees with them.
I disagree with that building you put there, which really is, I
disagree with that thought or opinion.
And the problem is the more we get reinforced, the more we go down
these data mining or conspiracies or thoughts and opinions
religions.
Take Facebook at the moment if you put a post on Facebook and you
get like likes and loves, we, we get these little endorphin hits.
These endorphin hits happen whether or not we have a great orgasm
in sex or whether we have a little like on Facebook.
They're just a different degree of it.
And we are addicted to these little feel good factors.
We're addicted to feeling better in the moment.
And feeling better in the moment gives us these little endorphins,
these little endorphin pills.
So whenever we find someone that agrees of our opinion, we reinforce
all these thoughts.
And the spiritual journey is about slowly breaking these down
and going well, okay, I'm aware of these endorphin pills.
I'm aware of my thoughts and beliefs.
I'm aware they could be right and they could be wrong, and they're
only mine, and we lose that attachment to them.
But it takes time and it takes nurturing and allowing to grow.
This is what this story is about with the Toad and the frog.
Instead of trying to force something to happen, instead of trying
to force letting go, if you try to, I need to let go of this.
If I give you a thought of a pink flying elephant, and I tell
you to let go of it by reminding you of it every day, if
I found you every morning and said, have you let go of that pink
flying elephant yet?
And you're gonna go, well, no, because you just reminded me again.
So the cycle continues.
So forcing ourselves to let go or forcing the seed to grow, forcing
these things that we're not really in control of just adds more
suffering and angst to our lives instead of just allowing things
to be what they are.
If Toad went about his life and just enjoyed the fact that he's
going to have a wonderful garden, it's going to happen anyway.
You know, no matter singing and dancing, no amount of screaming
and shouting is going to force these things to happen.
How do you know your meditation is working?
How do you know your spiritual journey is working?
Ken Wilbur answered this beautifully.
When a woman stood up and says, how do I know my practice is
working?
And he first of all joked about.
He said, well, first of all, you'll be spending more and more
time alone.
And if you're single now, if you struggled finding a date before,
you will find it nearly impossible now, because we find it
harder to get along with people that are not working in the
same way as we are in the same direction on the spiritual journey.
It's very lonely, and you might feel more alone.
But he said, more importantly, you'll feel things deeply, but you'll
suffer less.
So you will feel the pain of others, you'll feel the pain of the
world, but you won't carry the weight of the world.
And this is what's really important about meditation.
It's about suffering less.
And we don't get rid of the suffering by getting rid of the feeling.
We get rid of the suffering by recognizing the feeling and being
able to do something with it.
So, as you see, Toad is suffering because he wants to get
something from it.
You know, the spiritual journey fundamentally leads to less
suffering.
But if we sit down to get less suffering, we will be suffering because
we're longing for to remove the suffering.
And if you're longing to remove something, you have to pay
attention to it.
It's about our motives.
And there's a wonderful quote by David Hawkins.
Spiritual development is not an accomplishment, but a way of life.
It is an orientation that brings its own rewards.
And what is important is the direction of one's motives.
So really, if you can drop the motives, if you can drop the need
for the seeds to grow, then imagine if Toad just put the seeds
in the ground and wasn't bothered whether they grew or not.
Perfectly happy with whatever come.
I've got 10 seeds.
If none of them grow, it's absolutely fine.
If all of them grow, it's absolutely fine.
How does that feel?
Feels so much better, right?
Instead of going and getting seeds and planting 10 and expecting
10 of a certain color, that's what we do.
We sit down to meditation and expect something from it.
So let's not expect something from our time at the moment.
Let's not have a motive behind everything.
Just allow things to be what they are.
When we sit, just sit and take time out.
I'm Stephen Webb and you can head over to my website to download
five Simple Practices for Inner peace.
The website is Stephen Gift.
Just to make it really easy, all you need to do is either look
in the show notes below or go to the URL and type Stephen Gif spelt
with a V. That would be amazing.
And thank you for listening to the podcast.
Thank you for spending time with me today.
And if this helps you, if it helps you to understand meditation
a little more, helps you on your spiritual journey, it helps
