Day 3 of my cleanse. Yesterday I started with some stiff muscles and not much else. Slowly over the course of the morning, however, I began to feel glimmers of a natural energy. My friend Jeff Warren wrote a piece for the New York Times about an intensive retreat he did. He spoke of a day, after a particularly dark night of the soul, when he started to feel this "silky" energy all around him. I've started to feel that. But it's intermittent.
I feel it for an hour or so, this feeling that I'm back in touch with my natural opiates, and then I get a headache, or fatigue sets in. Yesterday I dealt with the fatigue by putting some chia seeds in a smoothy. Today, as I drive my parents to the airport for their trip to Israel, my adrenaline will probably be coming from my lack of sleep. Woke up early this morning around 3 a.m. Monkey mind crawling around. So I meditated for about forty five minutes. Then read some Pema Chodron. It was a chapter about the in-between state. The place that meditators have to live in for a long time until they grasp that the uncertainty is actually a stable resting point.
I feel right now that this cleanse is something of an in-between state. I feel ready to start giving up my addictions and facing my suffering. As Chodron writes, pizza and videos are no match for suffering. So better to just face it and let it build the strength and wisdom it can nurture.
Around 6 a.m. I went back to meditating. It went better than yesterday. I do feel a certain energy building, a sharp feeling in my gut that if both painful, but also a familiar starting point of natural pleasure. And around me, the "silky feeling".
It's the tender place that Chodron talks about. The place of bodhichitta It's the place I want to protect and cultivate, for myself and for everyone in my life.
