What is your Wildmind?

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

According to Buddhist teachings, our minds are inherently pure and luminous.

Sometimes, when we’re struggling with the stress of uncooperative children, or feeling frazzled trying to keep up with the unrealistic expectations of our employers, this can be hard to believe.

But the same teachings go on to say that our inherently pure and luminous minds are contaminated with “defilements” - those very states of stress, anger, and self-doubt that plague our lives. This, perhaps, is more familiar territory.

The aim of Buddhist meditation is to clear away the “adventitious defilements” so that we can experience ourselves — more deeply and more truly - in our primordial purity, clarity, and freedom of mind. Meditation helps us to cut through the agonizing clutter of superficial mental turmoil to allow us to experience more spacious and joyful states of mind.

It is this pure and luminous state that I call your “Wildmind.” This Wildmind, as I have said elsewhere, is not the wild mind that is disturbed by the winds of ill will, compulsive craving, or anxious restlessness, but lies beneath your wild mind like the still depths of the ocean lie beneath even the most tempestuous ocean.

When you think of true wilderness — The Wild — everything exists in a balance. No one has to organize the wild. Trees grow beautifully, shaped by the wind and the limitations of the resources available. Where a rock lies is the perfect place for that rock. No one has to tell the water where to flow and where to sit still. Everything unfolds in its own nature, and does so perfectly.

When the mind is imbued with mindfulness, the same thing happens. Things fall into place. balance is achieved. There’s no conflict. And this all happens without any micromanagement of this thought and that emotion. Everything unfolds in its own nature, and does so perfectly. That’s the goal at least. On the way to that goal there is work to be done, and this site is a manual for that work.

You have almost certainly had experiences that are close to the stillness, joy, and expansiveness that are the nature of your Wildmind. You may have experienced your Wildmind while in nature, for example. Your Wildmind is the mind that resonates with nature. It is the part of you that experiences awe and reverence. It is the childlike part of you that feels a profound wonder at the mystery that anything is, and - even more mysteriously - that you can be aware of it.

Pages: 1 2