How do I overcome impatience and restlessness?
Nukunu:
Impatience and restlessness are the main hindrances for meditation and spiritual awakening. The ego-mind don’t want to be silent and still. It feels like death to the mind.
Enlightenment is not something you can understand, it is something “you are,” but to realise it, the mind must be silent – without understanding. This is so simple: “just be!”But to silence the mind is very difficult, especially in the modern western culture. Life has become a madness of noise and activity.
Meditation is the way to silence the mind, because awakening can only happen in a moment of stillness. When there is a moment of silence – stillness – there is no “me” and therefore no duality (thinker and object). With stillness the ego also vanishes and that is awakening.
So we meditate to silence the mind! We just have to remember that to meditate as a doing involves the ego-me. If you like to use meditation to silence the mind, then after some time drop the very act of meditation (the doing) and “just sit”. Don’t “do” anything! Doing will immediately take you into the mind and away from clarity and enlightenment.