The Art of Meditation

Two haiku and some musings

Created on Midjourney

Images, colors
Interrupt meditation
Breathe, begin again

On the date of writing, some of these images began to appear as I meditated. They are some of those I created in a collaboration with Iosis Art, another generative artist on Instagram. (I really love their work. You should go check it out!)

While we haven’t finalized (again, at the time of writing), which images we’ll publish, I don’t think any of these will be used. But I do love them, and I’m delighted at how much more visually oriented I’ve become since beginning my generative art journey.

Their appearance during my meditation set me to thinking (afterward) about how many people would feel that the images were a hindrance to meditation, or even that these types of “interruptions” mean that they can’t meditate. Or that they’re “getting it wrong.”

Meditation is sometimes described as “the art of beginning again.” Our minds are meant to think, and they wander naturally, one might even say compulsively. It’s normal both in life and in meditation. When we meditate, we acknowledge where our mind has been and simply begin again. And again and again, as many times as necessary until the bell rings to tell us we’ve completed the time we set.

I’ve taught meditation to both patients and coaching clients over the years. That doesn’t mean I’m an expert. Far from it. I’m a beginner. Keeping a beginner’s mindset allows me to approach meditation with curiosity and a willingness to always find something new within it. Currently, that new thing is highly visual.

Which is more than I had meant to say in this post. I do want to also share another haiku with you, though, based on the image with the silvery-white scales. This one, in particular, brought forth another thought, which led to another haiku.

Alien Visage
Loves, hates, hurts; Inside you’re not
So different from me

Two comments on this. The first is related to the number of syllables in the last line. Some will claim there are six, rather than five. If you search the internet, you’ll find differing opinions on whether different contains two or three syllables. Correctly pronounced, it has two: diff/rent. You can read about this in this post from Practice Makes Perfect on common pronunciation mistakes.

The second comment is that, though the image that prompted the haiku is of what would be thought of as an alien, this is equally applicable to humans who differ from us in any way. We are inherently built to “other” people who don’t belong to our tribe. This has evolutionary survival roots that no longer apply but remain embedded in our psyches anyway.

I won’t go into the details around this, as that wasn’t the point of this post. However, it seems to me that all our lives would improve if we collectively worked to look past external differences to the similarities inside.

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This has been a wandery kind of post. (Yes, I adjectivized that verb.) I’d love to hear your thoughts on any or all of it. The only rule is that there’s no room for hate here.