Don't just DO something, SIT there

 ...... sit there.   This is one of Osho's brilliant phrases that's grown with me.  It turns our western addiction to activity on its head.  We've internalised the command to keep busy so well, we don't need someone else to tell us.  But it's not simple, I know.  I lived - or maybe I didn't really live - trying to squeeze in more and more activity to less and less time.  With a background anxiety that if I didn't, time would run out and my dreams would stay unfulfilled.   Then I was drawn to meet Osho, one of the greatest commentators and teachers of meditation, when I was 23 and I knew the wisdom he was offering was food for my soul.  He said that all his discourses were different ways of saying 'meditate', 'know yourself'.   But outside the structure of an ashram or meditation retreat, it's much harder to just sit.  Apart from the necessities of life - and who decides what they are -  the desire for distraction...

An odd thing to start writing, when the title of this blog is 'Don't just do something, SIT there?' That's the paradox of meditation in the marketplace and a lifelong lesson from my spiritual root teacher, Osho.  Answering a disciple, Osho replied 'Meditation in the marketplace is my whole message.'  How to be centred, in a non-dual resting place, when the world around me seems to be going crazy. Or is incredibly boring, not what I want it to be. For most, there's no retreating into a hermit life (or escaping to the Himalayas as Osho used to put it). We're here now, in this world of contradictions and separation. It can also be a world of joy, peace and fulfillment. Often it's not the content of an experience, but the way I respond which colours my feelings. Then operating in the marketplace can be a mirror, a mirror flickering and changing as the events, impressions and challenges of life impact me. And who is it that observes this mirror? Well, jus...