Know your human beingness
Robert Sheehan plays dead & comes back to Life
By Alison McEvoy
“The true meditative journey really only starts once you put the books down and everything else, all the instruction manuals and stuff.” (Rob Sheehan)
To put the book down you must have picked the book up and, furthermore, to have read the book. So, let’s rewind.
Robert Sheehan, Irish actor and author spoke to us recently about his meditative memoir ‘Playing Dead’;
“The mission is about having a laugh while talking about meditation at the same time…this subject can get very heavy and the mission of the book was to avoid that and have chats about it like it was just some friends down the pub or around the campfire.”
THE PROMISE OF MATERIALISM
It is tempting to think that more money, more material resources, would bring us peace and happiness. Some of us fall out of love with that dream and some of us never truly do. When we do, the simple pleasures of life start to shine as the gold dust they really are. Rob’s story shows how he fell out of love with the promise of success and wealth by climbing right to it’s pinnacle;
“I was working away quite a lot in my late twenties and my life was, materially, going well on the surface. I was achieving the things that I set out to achieve..I told myself, unconsciously, that these things would make me whole…happy in the eyes of other people and in myself. So all of that was happening…and it was making me really miserable.”
RECONNECT WITH SELF
When you’ve achieved what you’re striving for, whatever that may be, only to find that it does not deliver beyond it-in-itself, you are left with your self. The self that started dreaming, hoping, wishing and wanting.
We all wish and want our way away from ourselves for various reasons. It can, as Rob says, be “so difficult to be with myself.”
“I thought, if there’s some sort of brokenness here…then there must be a benefit to sitting down…taking a look and seeing what’s going on and make more sense of it.”
We might see the brokenness and the broken connection to the self, of the Self. When they reconnect, and we are our Self looking at our self, we may experience reconnection and a sense of wholeness.
As lovely as that sounds and is, it’s not all that easy. That’s where we might find ourselves picking up the books and manuals – helping us to reorient, console and bolster ourselves.
SLOW + STEADY
“I thought, this is a deep set problem, so I’m going to give it 6 months to a year…. About a year in, I’d gotten used to inwardness and found there to be massive, unfolding, interesting benefits to turning my focus inwards and discerning more and more about the thing we call the Self.”
“The experience of the Self will unfold…but that does take time because we’ve been conditioned for life and it takes a while to dismantle that conditioning.”
SIFTING THROUGH THE ‘MENTAL TALK’
One thing we often get bombarded with when we stop to sit and be, or meditate, is “mental talk”.
“Don’t demonize the mental talk. That’s a pitfall of meditation practice, one that happens early on.”
“Try the labelling technique. So a mental form comes into your mind and you’re relaxed enough to notice it…a surface mind thought…and then slap a little post-it note label on it. An imaginary post-it note is a great technique for learning the themes of the mental forms that are popping up in your head.”
“When you realize how basic they are…it sort of undermines the former authority that your surface mind, that you gave so much of your energy to, used to have.”
When you are relaxed enough to notice your thought forms, and prepared enough to label them for what they are ex. future worry, past annoyance, wishful thought etc. then eventually you start to notice the space between the coming and going of those thought forms. In this space between you begin to explore the realm of the Self;
“The post-it note pops onto the thought and then it disappears and what you’re left with is the great, infinite, perceptual newness. So it words in two ways; it helps you to see those thoughts for what they are…but it also points your focus down into the eternal ocean that is you, and all of the endless potential for exploration deep into that and all of the wonderful layers you can embody not just the frequency that allows for these thoughts, but there are lower and lower and lower frequencies that you can tune into, like a radio.”
EXPLORE YOUR ENTIRE HUMAN BEINGNESS
“A human is like a reality radio and there are all these different stations with different insights, inspiration…and it’s about learning how to tune, naturally, lovingly, out of one and into another.”
“That’s the potential of meditation. You learn so much more about how this human being thing works. You enrich human beings by teaching them human beingness, along with teaching them facts about stuff. The facts mean nothing unless there’s personal development, emotional maturity and dare I say spiritual maturity.”
Ultimately, achieving in the world is not the cake, but the cherry on top of sweet comfort of living close to one’s true Self. We can weather the thought forms, or actual storms, with so much more grace and steadiness when we know ourselves, where our real value and truth lies – within.
GIVE IT TIME
“I don’t think there is a great deal of complexity to what we’re talking about, I think the complexity comes in the practice of it… The difficulty is in actually sitting down and making time for oneself…and giving it time.”
So if you’d like to sit down and give yourself a head-start, Rob’s book is available in bookstores now.
@rozzymikes