On Reflection...

Yet again, feels like such a long time since i last posted!

I love coming back here and reading past blogs. Its interesting to see the different places that I have been in my head!

I never did write down how the second vipassana meditation went. It was so completely different than the other one......

The days were very long, and the isolation really got to me this time. The first time I did it, everything was so new. The silence was so refreshing and easy, and the meditation was so fascinating. But the second time, it was just so different. I went away from it knowing that it was a good experience, but not knowing exactly why it was a good experience. I didn't feel any better really, in myself. And for a while afterwards I was quite disappointed.

It wasn't until I was having dinner with a good friend of mine and we were speaking about the experience, that she said something that made me realise how important the second course was to me... Quite simply, that I have changed so much since the first course.

Now I know you are probably rolling your eyes at me.... Yes Mel, I have heard this before... I have even written about this in the blog. I have spoken about it, I knew it. But... I never FELT it. I was fully aware that I was clinging to a part of myself that doesn't exist anymore, that hippy, spiritual, meditating, airy, searching part of me that was created after a couple of failed relationships and life events that made me realise that I had no idea who I was, and I had no idea what life was really about.

But I am NOT THAT SAME person. None of us are that same person... We are constantly changing, every minute of every day our cells are dying, replacing, dying replacing... We are almost literally made of different stuff than we were back a month ago, let alone 6 months, or a year or more. And not just that. Our thoughts. Our thoughts change with every new experience we have. New nerve pathways are being made, new thought structures are taking place. How can any of us be the same as we were in the past. We are not. So why do we cling to it? Why do we cling to who we used to be, or what we used to believe in... Its all used.

Having a physical experience of something that was once almost magical to me, and it being almost agonising the second time, has made me FEEL, not just on an intellectual level, how much I have changed.

So, although I am sure this is not the end of my struggle with who I used to be, its at least one step closer to embracing who I have become, and that has made all the difference in my life.

I leave you with a quote from one of my psychology text books... I wanted to put this in because it blew my mind when I read it, and i just feel its appropriate for this post. It may surprise you that it is not a hippy quote or anything like that, its not how you should live your life, its not about changing your life or improving things... Its just awesome. I love astronomy and thinking about the vastness of the universe. I love that point where your mind cannot comprehend the size, or magnitude of what is out there. And when I read this, well.... Hopefully you will get it too...

Mel xo

- "So what is so special about the human brain? Part of the answer is its great complexity. The brain is composed of highly specialised cells, the most important being neurons whose function is to communicate with each other using a mechanism that is not dissimilar to an on-off switch. It has been estimated that our brain contains in the region of 1 Billion neurons (1,000,000,000,000), a figure so great that if you took a second to count every one it would take over 30,000 years. However what makes the brain really complex is the way its neurons are arranged and connected. Neurons rarely form connections with each other on a one-to-one basis, but rather a single brain nerve cell may project to between 5,000 and 10,000 other ones. This means that for 1 billion neurons, there are literally TRILLIONS of connections (synapses) in the human brain, and this is where the main information processing of the brain takes place. This figure is truly astronomical - In fact it has been said that the number of possible synaptic connections among neurons in the human brain is greater than the number of single atomic particles that constitute the ENTIRE UNIVERSE"

- Andrew Wickens, Introduction to Biopsychology 3rd Ed, Pearson ed.