🧠 Zazen Meditation (Zen Buddhism): The stillness within. Pure and panoramic present moment awareness, without clinging to anything and without resisting to anything.
Ask yourself
How often do you get to question how free you are? How many times have you vividly and consciously experienced freedom? Do you know what it feels like? Has the meaning of the word ever truly reached you?
These could easily be just rhetorical questions, but at the moment, and after experiencing this meditation almost every day for the last months, I have finally started trying to answered them.
The meditation experience I had today wasn’t necessarily the most illuminating one to begin with. This meditation felt, for most of the time, like one of the habit-keeping ones. I sit in the posture, I breathe deeply, I try to close my mouth gently and tuck my chin in. I take the time to be here and now, to decompress – that’s my essential goal every morning – and when I’m there, I’m proud of myself for investing time in tending my mind and soul.
But then something else started to bubble up in the last part of the meditation. I connected deeply to the prompt of “no analysing, no judgement, no clinging”. I had this breakthrough where I realised that the thoughts and voices in my head tend to limit me more than anything outside of me. I noticed that I have voices that aren’t mine, that are telling me awful things about myself, judging me, criticising every single thing I do wrong. Then, in the vein of no judgement, no clinging, I just let them go… From within I came through and told myself: it’s all good, just let them go, and I felt free.
Looking inside
In therapy, I was asked what my inner child wants, what did little Valentina want of her life when she was young? And I just instantaneously said: to be free and have fun.
But it was only now, after months of that therapy session, after many different experiences in my travels, and after keeping my daily meditation habit, that the awakening has surfaced. I’m the only one taking away my freedom. I can be free. I can let the negative voices go and then there’s a new way for me. A wide open field, with no beaten paths. It’s all fresh and new and wild and exciting. I just can’t believe how I didn’t notice earlier. But that’s how these things go… you kinda need to be listening all the time until one day you find the right frequency and click! your mind just expanded a little more.
This might sound very personal, but I truly believe it resonates with many people out there. I want to say that especially now, in our times, freedom is not something we fully engage with at a healing and personal level.
Scroll: Off
I see people in many trains, in different cities, just looking at their phones aimlessly and I just hope they are at least having some fun. But the truth is that that fun might be costing them some of their freedom.
I engage with social media myself at a very basic level, just because 3-4 years ago I started realising that my anxiety was taking a main role in my emotional ecosystem while spending time looking at things in social media. I don’t know if it was caused by FOMO or just plain comparison to others (which is something I didn’t know, and I’m still trying to learn, how to cope with). I never felt good after spending time online doing something I actually used to enjoy years prior. Taking photos, uploading them to a platform and sharing them with my circle. I used to feel inspired by others, even encouraged to do more of what I love. But then things got weird, and commercial, and fake, and angry, and hatred started to be used as a weapon, and influencers started becoming celebrities for selling their opinions, and people seemed to continue to engage even more vigorously with the platforms, and then more platforms started popping up, and now all I can see is people with dopamine withdrawals thinking that the world is bad.
I don’t have a stand to climb on top of this high horse that’s coming to get me and I don’t want to ride it. I just want to make sure we can all investigate within ourselves the reasons why we do what we do and see if freedom is ever part of our inner conversations – conversations worth having with yourself every day if you can.
Give yourself the space in a day to talk to your inner desires, figure out what they are and don’t let anyone else tell you what they should be. I just want you to ask yourself more productive questions, which I know can be a bit hard sometimes, but trust that going through the pain of putting something in the light will help you in the future.
Seize it now, before it goes away.
If this sounds preachy, it is because I so truly hope people are able to realise that the world is amazing and life is soooo worth living. But with living, I mean LIVING: taking this opportunity you got given to be here and make the most out of it. It doesn’t have to look like your friend, sister, colleague or any other person’s life. It’s yours.
You are the only one who can help you achieve what you want. To expose yourself to the world (which is happy to have you) and feel all the feelings within the human spectrum. And when you are feeling, don’t judge your feelings, just let them come while noticing how they show up in your body… they are teaching you a lesson.
Be in touch with your values and the things you want to see before you die. I mean, CARPE DIEM as much as you can, cause if there’s something we all know (and for some crazy reason seem to ignore) it is that we are all going to die. MEMENTO MORI. And while death sounds unfriendly, maybe it doesn’t need to be.
If we are present, like truly, mindfully present, we get to appreciate the moment being lived and the people with whom we shared our moments with. We can make our seconds worth a million of years, and as such, our memories and the memories we have of others will live forever in our minds. And when death comes to say hello, we can embrace it as the thing we knew was coming at some point, and that by its imminence, we were able to enjoy and seize every instance of our existence.
Let silence and focus show you the way
Which brings me back to our reality, and how we manage our time. Keep in mind the above and stay away from your phone for a morning or afternoon.
Get yourself out of the walls around you. Take a walk, or sit in a park, or do something you love. Stay offline for long enough that you can start noticing your thoughts. Let them sift through. Notice them, say hello to them, don’t reject them, don’t judge them, they are just passing by – it would be rude to treat someone passing by like that, so don’t do it to your own thoughts.
Then just breath, feel the air coming in your body, giving you life. Think of the trees and the nature that provides that air for you to breath. Share a second with them, realise we are all connected after all. Then exhale and let those limitations inside you go. You are free. So go be free.
Do whatever you want as long as it doesn’t take anything away from your other fellow living beings. Your freedom ends where the freedom of others begin.
