The Dance of Deviation

The battery on my laptop shows 84% and that should be sufficient for me to write this blog article for the week. Let me type a few lines of irrelevant sentences just to warm up my fingers and to get my thoughts flowing. I have been working hard the past week and last night I was thinking what I should be blogging about today.

I thought about balance. Again, I'm sure I've written about this before but the point is so important that it bears repeating. It's good to start with an analogy. We all know about physical balance--when you are walking on a ledge or standing on a stool, we all have to constantly adjust ourselves to avoid falling. I believe I've also likened meditation as being like walking on a tightrope. Thoughts are constantly throwing us off-balance and we need to readjust ourselves to come back to our object of meditation, which is usually the breath.

As you practice more, you begin to have less deviations from the centre of focus. Every time the mind strays, you become aware of the 'imbalance', and bring the mind back to the centre. After a while, you begin to do this instinctively, like how you avoid falling on a bicycle. You move your body and adjust the wheels so that you and the bike continue going steadily forward.

Riding a bicycle is I think a better analogy for meditation. We all have to learn to acquire the skill that keeps us balanced on a bicycle. After we've acquired it, we don't even think about the act anymore. It just happens. When we meditate often, we are training the mind to be balanced. It doesn't mean that we are permanently locked on one thought or object but we simply know where we are heading towards even if our trajectory is not a perfectly straight line. We will always sway and deviate but instinctively we make tiny adjustments which we are not even aware of to maintain our course.

That's what a mind trained in meditation is like. We have acquired that subtle sense of poise that ensures that the mind is never knocked off-balance. The better we are at it, the less wobbling we'll experience as we propel ourselves forward in time. I've also likened the process to surfing. Knowing these analogies make it easier to understand what meditation is all about.

We do not fear a mind that constantly deviate because we have an awareness of our position and direction. Trust the system to make the necessary readjustments. Once we've acquire the rhythm, we are moving perfectly in response to the stream of inputs that come from our senses and which arises spontaneously from within. This is the dance of deviation, which shall be the title and the last line of this blog post.