I'm grateful to Shinzen Young for filling me in on the twenty-minute ceiling. This is the stage in meditation training where you feel yourself again and again popping out of concentration and back into ordinary distracted thinking.
Now that I know about it, I'm more alert to what it is that blocks me from going beyond twenty minutes.
I'm convinced everytime I head into the second twenty minutes that I'm going to be bored, struggling, struggling, struggling with this pop.
Of course it's the opposite. It's in the next twenty minutes that I usually start feeling the most fascinating feelings. That magnetic, bouncy, warm, always surprising powerful chi.
That's when I feel the next fear: that this is so cool, surely the rest of the world is going to become increasingly boring to me. How on earth will I be able to hang around all of the boring, unenlightened, egomaniac, people, once I've become so powerful?
Obviously I'm just as wrongheaded in that fear. It's no doubt the opposite. If I were to get to an expert level, maybe everyone's ignorance, and striving, and complicated living would become as lovable to me as Ben is when he's so sure he has it right.
And maybe I'll finally find joy in being there for people. For all people. Like I did that day when I was able to help my mother in the hospital.
Maybe I'll enjoy being around people because more and more I'll believe that they enjoy being around me.
This morning I got up very early and went beyond the 40 minutes, into a third twenty minute session. There I felt the solid magnetic energy that I am becoming more and more familiar with. In that place it is so easy for me to decide to give up worrying now and forever. Because connected to this power, how could my future manifest as anything but good.
I will continue to take things one day at a time. But I would love to have a life where that morning hour was an unshakeable part of my day. What a wonderful life that would be.
Just for today, I will imagine my life as though this is what is inevitably going to happen. As though my locus of control is now permanent and immoveable. What a wonderful life this is.
