There’s a phrase that I first learned at the start of my meditation journey. It’s been with me for 5 years, and I imagine it will stick around in my consciousness forever:
At the time, I was in desperate pursuit of an “inner peace” that I wasn’t sure existed.
Meditation is magic: but first, it’s work.
It takes effort to calm a chaotic mind, and sitting down to be reminded of the overwhelming volume of my thoughts was not a pleasant experience. Not at first.
But something clicked when I heard this phrase: “Remember the blue sky.”
This comes from Headspace, the meditation app I started with. I can still hear it in Andy’s voice, and like most truths, I didn’t absorb it all at once. The concept was repeated again and again, and drip-fed into my stream of consciousness.
Basically, it goes something like this: when we’re heavily identified with our minds, we think they’re chaotic. Honestly, the “untrained” mind is chaotic, filled with thoughts and stories that we immediately believe to be true.
The thing is: it’s not the actual mind that’s chaotic. It’s the habit of entertaining every thought that comes to pass through it.
Our minds are not stormy or cloudy or windy; everyone’s mind experiences weather, but our “natural state” of mind is the blue sky.
The “blue sky” is the mind itself: a blank and peaceful canvas, the background on which our thoughts are painted.
I remember this thought coming into clearer focus as the days went on, and my meditation “habit” started to solidify. By the time I had practiced enough to actually call it a practice, the “blue sky” concept had changed my relationship to my mind.
This discovery is pure peace: that our default state is not chaos, but stillness. That peace is not absence of thought, but the practice of allowing thought to pass.
Each thought is a cloud, and the practice of meditation is actually the practice of peace. Every time we allow a thought-cloud to pass, we have the opportunity to experience our natural “peace of mind.”
Peace, it turns out, is not something to strive for: it’s something to allow.
Peace is a practice. It’s already there. We’re not practicing to “achieve” it; we’re just practicing feeling it so we can remember it’s still there when the clouds start to roll in.
Clouds come and go. No matter how many we can see - and no matter how ominous - we know the blue sky is still there.
It’s always there, just waiting for you to remember it.