You Are the Riverbed

You Are the Riverbed | nik.art

Water is a common mindfulness analogy, and, in many instances, it works. Imagining yourself as a river can help with adaptability, resilience, and working around obstacles instead of plowing through them.

But in my own meditation sessions, I rarely find myself with that visual. If a river pops up in front of my inner eye, I’m usually sitting on its bank. Feet in the grass, watching. I see thoughts floating through the river, but I’m not the water. I’m just an observer.

The other day, I was meditating in my garden. It was around 9 AM. Nature had long woken up, but now, civilization was beginning to stir as well. I heard birds chirping, insects buzzing, and the wind rustle the grass, hedges, and leaves in the trees. In the distance, I heard people clanking with pans, babies waking up with a scream, and the sound of window shutters rising. I felt the hot sun on the right half of my body.

Whenever I had a slightly negative reaction to one of these impressions—"The people are being noisy," "The sun is too hot"—I was only left with one conclusion: "Right now, I can’t do anything about this. I’m meditating. So I guess I’ll just accept everything as it is."

Since the world kept turning, and I was merely existing, I felt like the riverbed more so than the river: Whatever happened, internally or externally, I let it flow through me, while I stayed in place the entire time.

If you’re the river, and someone throws plastic trash into you, you’ll react. You’ll shake yourself and try to reject the toxic input. If you’re the river, and your color turns from clear blue to dark brown, you worry about your health. And if you’re the river, you’ll flow as fast as you can and reach as far as you may.

The riverbed, meanwhile, does none of these things. The riverbed hosts the river, no matter whether it’s small, large, fast, slow, dirty, or squeaky clean. No matter what comes around the bend, the riverbed waits. It accepts. It observes. And it stays exactly where it is.

Mindfulness is about presence, and a mind that’s moving loses the ability to observe. The faster you go, the less you will see, yet the more obstacles will seem to magically appear. To combat the misnomer and make your mind empty and open, you’ll have to stop.

You are the riverbed, not the river—and whatever’s going through you is just another traveler en route to the sea.

Nik

Niklas Göke writes for dreamers, doers, and unbroken optimists. A self-taught writer with more than a decade of experience, Nik has published over 2,000 articles. His work has attracted tens of millions of readers and been featured in places like Business Insider, CNBC, Lifehacker, and many others.

Nik has self-published 2 books thus far, most recently 2-Minute Pep Talks. Outside of his day job and daily blog, Nik loves reading, video games, and pizza, which he eats plenty a slice of in Munich, Germany, where he resides.

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You Are the Riverbed

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