I read about this meditation a while back.  It’s taught by a female yoga guru whose name I can’t find anywhere, maybe someone can comment and remind me.

The meditation is pretty simple.  Anything that comes to mind, potentially interrupting your meditation groove, you accept it.  You say to yourself “this too”  and when the next thing comes along as it inevitably will, you say to yourself, “ah this too”.  It’s a way of bringing it all into your zone of OK.  You open up the gate and usher it in.  It’s your own personal OK Corral.

So what it means is that instead of getting cheesed off at yourself because you suck at meditating (reality: we all do) or getting rattled because you can’t still your mind (reality: none of us easily can) you just accept.  Whatever it is.  Whatever lame-ass thought wants to trot through your head, you bring it in to your OK Corral.

This is a good approach to life in general.  When things bug you or threaten to knock you off-center, see if you can say, “ah this too”.   

I love the “ah” part.  It’s part relief.  There’s an element to it that says, “oh good I get to be OK about this too”.  Faced with a crazy person, thing or situation? Come on into my corral.  

And it’s especially relief when you hit bottom on something.  When you say to yourself – OK, i’m done, i’m out of ideas, i’m past thinking I’ve got the answers and I’m out of fooling myself into believing I can deal.  I’m just done.  That’s serious relief.  I’m simply choosing to be OK with this because I don’t see any other option.  That’s a good place to be for a control-freak like me.  It takes a while to get there.

And there’s another part of “ah” that’s delight.  Like, “oh *good*, I get to be OK about this too”.  I can just choose to be OK.  No big deal. That’s a pretty powerful place to be.  It’s usually when I’m feeling pretty balanced, and let’s face it, the planets are aligned correctly, that I can do that.  But I’ll take it when I can get it.

Now don’t get me wrong, being OK doesn’t mean we’re not working toward a different end.  It just means that we allow the reality of the situation to be OK while we work toward tweaking it.  It means instead of wasting time hating what is and resisting it and looking for some poor sucker to blame I’m going to choose to feel balanced about it.  And if I feel more balanced about what is, I’m going to have better focus and more energy to put toward what I want.  

But the journey is important because *not* letting stuff into your OK Corral is just as important as letting stuff in.  It’s an opportunity to look at your obstacles.  If you absolutely can’t be OK with this person, thing or situation - how come? 

What’s holding you back from ushering it in?  Maybe it totally pushes one of your buttons.  Great, what an opportunity to get to know your hot buttons.  What’s it about? What’s the pattern?  What’s the deep habitual groove that you get into in every situation like this one? What’s the emotional habit?  What’s the belief underlying the resistence to it?  Maybe your hot button is what you let into your OK Corral. 

Because it’s only when we’re OK with our buttons that we can even hope to understand them.  And it’s only with understanding that we can even consider other options of responding.  And it’s only by understanding other options that we’ll consider trying them when we’re deep in a situation.  So that one day we can choose to do it all differently.  And that is seriously OK.