“Are you not tired of living
Inside your mind-desert?
If so, then come and live
In your heart’s aspiration-oasis.”
– Sri Chinmoy
Our heart’s meditation is our own personal oasis: lush, soothing, refreshing, inspiring, encouraging and invigorating.
Too often, our experience of life, outer and inner, resembles an arid desert.
We know that meditation is supposed to cure us of all our worries, problems and anxieties. Yet sometimes our experience of meditation itself seems dry, mechanical and uninspiring, leaving us feeling further frustrated, disappointed and discouraged.
This happens when we meditate in our mind, when we go through the motions of meditation, its techniques and rituals, without really throwing ourselves heart and soul into the practise.
It’s easy to say: “meditate in the heart, don’t meditate in the mind!” – but being in the mind, can be like finding ourselves caught in a high-walled maze of hedges, with no clue how to find our way out.
Gratitude, aspiration, love, humility, selflessness and enthusiasm are ready accomplices, eager to help us escape from our mind-maze. The moment we break free from the mind’s grasp, we find our heart already waiting for us with its joyful embrace. Once our hearts’ floodgates are open, our experience of meditation becomes spontaneous, even without any techniques and rituals.
Birds and animals will always find their way to an oasis in the desert, no matter how tiny, remote or difficult to access. They have an innate sense of its location. Similarly, we must keep our own inner tracking device always connected with the oasis of our heart, so that no matter how lost, tired, thirsty or dispirited we find ourselves in the deserts of life, we are always able to find our way back to the replenishing, nourishing and inspiring oasis of our heart’s meditation.