While talking with a friend about meditation and the buddhist idea that the world is occupied with a force called maya, that wants you to stop seeking awareness, and perhaps making an effort towards enlightenment by plying you with distractions. Maya could be summed up as all the things that disturb your meditative awareness. Everything from a ringing phone, a neighbor kid ringing the doorbell, or an itch on your nose that is driving you to distraction. It’s all maya.

Then as part of the conversation, an image from a beloved movie appeared in my head, of the Junk Lady from the movie “The Labyrinth”. She is all hunched over, surrounded by Junk in the Junk Fields where she makes a home, and spends all her time trying to dissuade the purpose of the main character with objects that she once loved. Handing them to the main character one after another, in a rapid succession to confuse and derail the greater effort of the plot in the movie.

The more I think about the Junk Lady, and that whole scene, the more it resonates. That maya is like that. An itch here, a ringing phone there, a screaming cat downstairs, a plane making the house rattle because its too low, or whatever else happens that tries to interrupt your focus on whatever it is you have selected. A word, an emotion, or your breathing. This force is also within as well, the little mind some call it, when you are trying to focus and all of a sudden, because you aren’t doing anything and that is strange and wrong for the little mind, it starts to run around like an agitated monkey, rummaging around and throwing out memories, stray thoughts, whatever it can get its clever little fingers around and bring to the big mind to get it to stop being quiet. Trying to count breaths and before you know it, you’re thinking about pulled pork and BBQ sauce as your stomach gurgles. That is maya, in a nutshell.