I've had some interesting and exciting experiences this week as the energy in my tan tien starts to build. I've connected with the warm liquid center. I've felt the pulsating electrical energy outside of myself as a living breathing presence. I had a moment where all my suffering disappeared and I was just bare awareness of the profound peace and abundance in the world. And I heard a voice telling me that this was now a permanent part of my life. This happiness.
But this morning, just a mundane practice. The impatience builds, wanting to feel the deep satisfying state of peace and joy. The impatience that I am coming to learn is the worst block to my progress.
Impatience means that my desire is coming from the wrong part of my body. Mostly the desire is in my head, in some place where I conceptualize what happiness is: a mystical state, a constant permanent state of thriving. And happiness may very well be these things. But it's not achieved by conceptualizing. It's achieved by achieving. Impatience is the vision becoming more important than the work.
So I bring the desire down to the core loop in my belly. This is the place where desire will be most quickly and productively satisfied. But I resist it because this desire, the place where this desire comes from has been so problematized by my life and the culture I come from. Real healthy desire feels a lot like sexual desire and in my celibate, single mother life, that desire connects me with a place of sadness, fear and abandonment.
So I go back to visualizing, rather than feeling what happiness is. It's safer. It's more comfortable. And my impatience protects me from having to go back there.
Babysteps. The smartest thing to do is to bring my awareness for brief moments, brief sessions to that place again and again. Don't look for the explosive clearing house, orgasmic moment of revelation and transcendence. Just get used to living, feeling, wanting from that place. Regularly, throughout the day.
The goal is not a mystical experience. The goal is a mystical life. A regular, habitual connection to this vital, healing, empowering energy, that I hope to share with as many people as I can.
