Ending your meditation practice
Stage “Omega”
We’ve talked about “Stage Zero” as being the important preliminary stage where we set up good conditions for meditating by working with our posture and our inner attitudes. I’ve compared it to the stage of mixing the ingredients for a cake, as well as making sure that the oven is at the right temperature. In other words we’re making sure that the conditions are congruent with the outcomes we want to achieve.
But in baking a cake there are also some things you want to do at the end of the baking process to make sure that the cake comes out right. You want to make sure, for example, that you have oven gloves on so that you don’t burn your hands and drop the cake on the floor. You need to check that the cake is in fact properly baked and that it doesn’t need a few more minutes in the oven. You need to place the cake on a rack so that it doesn’t go soggy.
Similar considerations apply in our meditation practice. It’s possible to ruin a perfectly good meditation by hurrying out of the practice. So here are a few tips so help ensure that your meditation ends well. I call this process of ending the meditation “Stage Omega” because it’s the final stage of the meditation, but isn’t usually enumerated. (You probably know this already, but Omega is the last letter in the Greek alphabet and is often used to represent the last thing in a series)
Stage Omega is important because you need to give yourself time to absorb the effects of the practice.
If you don’t pay attention to the effects that the meditation practice has had on your mind and emotions, then you might not realize that any changes have taken place. This can be rather dispiriting, to say the least. Often we develop much more of a sense of calmness than we are consciously aware of, and if we don’t give ourselves time to appreciate this we might immediately undo the positive states that we’ve created by smothering them with despondent or frustrated thoughts and feelings.
On the following pages you’ll find some suggestions about how to practice in Stage Omega.
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