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Mental Discipline Is Foundational for Mental Health
How regular, diligent meditation leads to the simple fulfillment we all seek
According to the data from my Garmin watch, I awoke at 3:28 am last night. I can also see that I had the night’s first short burst of REM (dreaming) sleep only a few minutes earlier, starting at 3:15 am. I remember waking up with a vague sense of dread, a lingering hopelessness reverberating from what was probably a disturbing dream, perhaps a nightmare.
That sense of discomfort in the body could easily have been parlayed by a wandering mind into worry or dread about various relatively innocuous situations in my waking life. While I have been dealing with several challenging circumstances, last night I was not being chased by a tiger, nor was my village being burned to the ground by marauding vikings.
Since I’ve practiced extensive amounts of Vipassana (“clear seeing”) meditation, I am aware that suffering is caused by the unconscious mind reacting to subtle, or not-so-subtle, sensations in the body, pushing away unpleasant sensations and grasping at pleasant ones. Last night, I could sense that there was a revved-up version of this kind of process happening below my conscious awareness, driving a troubling emotional state and prompting my conscious mind to look for external…
