09.22: If we can worry, we can meditate

Many people feel that meditation requires some extraordinary ability to concentrate that they don’t possess, so they don’t even try to meditate. However, the fact is that all of us have the ability required for meditation, as is evident whenever we worry. During worry, we let our thoughts take us away from our circumstances to a problem – real or imagined. And letting our thoughts take us away from our circumstances is the essential ability required for meditation. Thus, all of us have the ability to meditate; we just need to redirect that concentration from a temporary worldly situation to an eternal otherworldly reality, God, Krishna. Of course, this redirection may initially seem difficult due to the default momentum of the mind to gravitate toward worldly situations, but we can muster the determination to counter the default motion by contemplating the contrasting effects of worrying and meditating: worrying drains us internally, whereas meditating energizes us internally. Lest we feel that things will go wrong if we don’t worry about that, we can take heart from Lord Krishna’s assurance in the Bhagavad-gita (9.22) that for those who start doing chintan (meditation) on him, he takes care of all their chinta (worries).