Keep Chewing

Meditation practice is something that can be like tasting a bitter fruit. At first, it seems very bitter, but as long as you keep chewing, you’ll discover its sweetness. The same true for meditation.

“When you are taking to meditation and beginning to change your habits, it sometimes looks as if you’re having a very thin time. I’m not trying to mislead anyone. This is hard work. In fact, my younger students sometimes tell me plaintively, “Life used to be so pleasant for us. Why is it now so . . . so icky?”

I sympathize. When I went through the same thing, I complained about it to my spiritual teacher, my grandmother. She was a very plainspoken teacher, with none of the euphemisms of the intellectual, so she simply led me to a nearby amla tree. The amla is a beautiful tree, a little like the mimosa, with a small fruit. She picked a fruit and said, “Here, take a bite.” I started chewing. It was pretty awful.

I said, “I’ve got to spit it out, Granny. It’s sour, bitter, unpleasant.” She just said, “Bear with me. Keep chewing for a while.” So I went on chewing, and to my surprise the amla fruit began to get sweeter and sweeter. Similarly, meditation and the allied disciplines require sustained enthusiasm every day — even when it seems icky. Especially when it seems icky! If you keep at it, you will find those same disciplines becoming sweeter and sweeter. When meditation time comes around you will find yourself hungering for the inner peace and calm it brings. The time will even come when you want a double helping”

~ Eknath Easwaran from Your Life Is Your Message: Finding Harmony With Yourself, Others & the Earth

Eknath Easwaran

If you practice long enough, you will begin to taste the sweetness of meditation. Don’t you want to know that it tastes like?


Books by Eknath Easwaran

Your Life Is Your Message: Finding Harmony With Yourself, Others & the Earth

by
Eknath Easwaran

***COURTESY OF TWOBEARS BOOKS*** Once, while Mahatma Gandhi’s train was pulling slowly out of the station, a European reporter ran up to his compartment window. “Do you have a message I can take back to my people?” he asked. It was Gandhi’s day of silence, a vital respite from his demanding speaking…

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