Brick Wall
'... fear is staring at the brick wall of our future and
seeing only what might go wrong.'
I came across this
passage in a book* one day when I was really worried about someone. The
author tells a story about building a brick wall with mortar and trowel.
When it was done, all he could see out of the thousand bricks he laid were
the two that he got wrong. He felt they spoiled the whole wall. But when a
visitor casually admired the wall, he found he could see the whole thing
and not just the bricks he got wrong. I used his brick wall story to make
a meditation about the worry I couldn't seem to shake.
How to Practice
- Imagine that your future is represented by a brick
wall. Now think about your worry. What does it look like as a brick in
that wall?
- It may be enormous or broken or the wrong colour.
(Mine was so big it blocked my view of any other bricks.) Let it be
what it is. It has a right to be there.
- To help restore a sense of balance in the wall we
need to offer balance. And that is done through love. Pour love into
the brick, as much as you can. Imagine it absorbing that love and
changing as a result. (I imagined it as a burst of brilliant light.
And as it lit up, I saw it get smaller and smaller until it sat
comfortably alongside all the other bricks in the wall. No bigger. No
smaller. It was welcome in the wall, just not welcome to dominate it
in an imbalanced way.)
* from Who Ordered This Truckload of Dung? by Ajahn Brahm pp46
Notes:
Ajahn Brahm uses this analogy through the whole book and
we can too. It can be a brick wall of accomplishment, a brick wall of the
past, or any other brick wall we need.
Final Notes:
There are no right or wrong ways to do a meditation. The
instructions are guidelines; adapt them to who you are and to your needs at
that particular time. Be curious about the process itself.
Remember most meditations become richer the more you
practice them. They reveal more of themselves. It can take practice to
remember to do a meditation when you need to, and it can take practice to go
through the steps. But that's why it is called practice, and for most of us,
we practice for the rest of our lives.
Meditations like these are a regular feature of my free monthly Ezine, Starry Night.
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