The master Sekiun used to say when one begins Zen flies must be welcomed. How do you deal with distractions?
In a choir down home we practised in a place quite near a railroad yard. Those were the days of steam and coal. The sound of the whistles would break our rehearsals, shaking the building. To deny them would mean we’d start on discordant notes, often sharp or flat and with rhythms set by the cadence of the competing trains. To block this out our choirmaster would stop, have us match the pitch, tone, and tempo, and then cut us off to begin a new work The notes did not linger in our repertoire , but the soul lingered in our prise winning interpretation. How does distraction aid or form your meditation?
The environment is part of meditation, if you fight it you undo all you might accomplish. Make the tone of the smoke detector your mantra, or more carefully choose and set your meditation space.
As one moves deeper in meditation one becomes more and more conscious of many more things, these can be traps and stumbling blocks if one is caught in the reactive mode of doing rather than the active mode of being. Bodhidharma shot the arrow across the river.
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Wow. I never thought about that. I guess it depends on how you frame, or look at the distraction.
It usually drives me nuts, but learning to deal with it is a good skill. I used to have a smoke detector that was low on batteries at a very high, difficult to reach spot on the ceiling. It would make a quick loud beep every ten minutes or so. I left it like that for over a year before stacking a chair on a table and risking breaking my neck to get the thing down. The detector used to really distract my meditation to the point of anger. Sometimes I would meditate in my closet to avoid it. I wish I’d heard your quote back then because it might have changed my outlook on the problem.
Let the annoyance/distraction move through you –no resistance, no response –observe it and let it go, grasshopper
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By being merely a detached observer, and not a critic/reactor, you will strengthen your practice. And, when your mind does react, get stuck on it, etc., just merely observe that, as well, without “comment” .
Challenging, but amusing; and, over time, will pay huge “dividends”, and alter your life very favorably. Good luck !!