Just Say Om
Dear Friends,
The wonder of joy, the healing of compassion and the power of our intentions are found and activated in meditation. Deep in meditation is where we reach the universal information field and the highest state of consciousness. A few mornings ago, my wife Laura was thoroughly into that state, meditating in bed before starting the day.
As for myself, I woke up after a rather fitful night of thinking about work and with those thoughts still racing through my head, I realized that I had made a decision that I regretted.
“Damn,” I muttered, just barely audible. If I had only gathered more information and had thought it through one more time.
“Did you just say ‘damn’?” asked Laura, lying next to me. “What are you damning first thing this morning?”
What was it that I was damning? I got up, washed my face, walked out on the terrace and tried to collect my thoughts.
It seems that sometimes when things are going round and round in our heads (life, work, the state of the world, whatever) a negative vibration swirls up from within and needs to be expressed. So, we end up sub-vocalizing, or even vocalizing some kind of expression, sometimes a word with four letters. When that happens, what is it that we’re really saying—damning something, somebody, maybe ourselves? I didn’t feel any better for saying “damn” as my first word in the morning. What was I thinking, or was I thinking too much, or perhaps not thinking at all?
A scene suddenly popped into my mind from the Wizard of Oz. Dorothy has just met the Scarecrow and is wondering how he can talk if he doesn’t have a brain. “People with no brains talk all the time,” is the Scarecrow’s candid answer.
It does seem to be a fairly common human trait to just blurt out whatever garbage happens to be flowing through our mad monkey brains: “Damn, I wish I hadn’t said whatever it was I said to whoever it was. Damn, I wish I wouldn’t have said ‘damn.’”
This self-imposed early morning therapy made me realize that sometimes negative thoughts or emotions do well up inside and occasionally get so strong that they find their way out in talk that comes from some brainless domain. I vowed never to do that again. The next time I feel like expressing bad vibes, I told myself, just say “Om” instead.
Hmmm. Ommmm. Sounds good. And it works. It makes us think before we speak. And once we say it, it kind of makes us think differently.
So, here’s to starting the day in a deep state of joy, compassion and intention found in the depths of meditation. And if we are lacking that, do a mini-meditation and just say ‘Om.’
Om, shanti, shanti, shanti,
Emanuel
