Beginning the Routine: Daily Meditation as an Adaptive Action
Today’s guest blogger is HSD Associate, Janice Ryan. She uses HSD in her personal and professional life in multiple ways. In this blogpost, read about her use of HSD and Adaptive Action in her meditation practice.
The best way to take care of the future is to take care of the present moment.
—Thich Nhat Hanh
Many of us have experienced the emotional, social, and career life benefits of learning to take Adaptive Action. For me, an important part of that process was beginning the routine of daily contemplation or meditation. I began that routine almost 15 years ago. Meditation continues to support me as I keep learning from and learning how to better overcome the pitfalls of living and aging in a world and a culture that is always changing.
I have always approached meditation as a form of Radical Inquiry. It isn’t that I think of the Radical Inquiry questions when I meditate. Radical Inquiry has instead become a way for me to reflect on all that I have learned. Now I know that meditation has been an Adaptive Action that has iteratively provided answers, revisions to those answers, and ways to use those answers to expand my points of meaningful connectedness.
Lifelong meditators call the reiterative Adaptive Action journey I have been on, a way to discover our True Self. I have been on this journey long enough to have a body feeling and a mind awareness of what they are saying. As an HSD Associate since 2008, I now understand the search for True Self as a lifelong reiterative Adaptive Action and discovery-making process of learning from Radical Inquiry.
For me, meditation has become a central part of my lifelong journey. I have learned through experience that we are always teaching, learning, and responding to a changing world. Understanding myself as an interconnected part of the world, reduces my confusion and has increased my self-awareness. This gives me a more mindfully present way to make routine choices. It also gives me a way to make new and potentially stressful decisions with more confidence and ease. No longer am I looking for illusive certainty because, I am no longer afraid of uncertainty.
Recently, I learned of an HSD Model that I hadn’t heard of before called Three Buckets. I was taught that Three Buckets is asking us to consider- “What is known? What is unknown? and What is unknowable?”. That’s when I realized that my meditation routine has always given me a way to explore these questions. The Three Buckets model helped me realize that exploring the unknowable is at the heart of meditation.
Exploring the unknowable through iterative Adaptive Actions over the last decade and a half, has given me a deeper understanding of the patterns called spiritual metaphors. I feel joy when I spot a human systems dynamics pattern observed by meditators from the distant past and from all over the world. I feel the energy of connectedness across time and space when I imagine them in Radical Inquiry as they aged in their own changing worlds. I consider myself fortunate each time I make a thought connection with a long-ago writer that is now called a spiritual mystic.
“Opening the eyes of my heart” feels like more than poetic language to me now. I have no idea if I would have been able to stick with a daily meditation routine for 15 years if I hadn’t also embedded the Adaptive Action model into my thinking. I have no idea if I would have learned so much if I hadn’t used the Radical Inquiry model to begin the search for my True Self. Now, I grow more confident in the Wisdom of HSD as I continue to “Iterate-Iterate-Iterate”. I embrace the comfort of knowing that I will never arrive because together- meditation, Adaptive Action, and Radical Inquiry - is an Infinite Game.