This month I'm practicing specifically with feelings.
I start a formal practice in open awareness then I shift into being aware of whatever feeling comes up. I try and notice the story lines and the images. If a feeling is really overwhelming I see if I can drop some of these story lines, images, and thoughts associated with it, so that I can be, in compassionate abiding, with the root feeling. No matter how difficult, eventually it passes.
But it's hard. Very hard for me, because I grew up in such an emotionally complicated family, so I become very easily lost in my feelings and memories. One thing I've been trying is from an old book I've had around for a long time, The Power of Mind. I try to remember the first time I ever had that feeling. I find this really helpful in locating the emotion in the body. It doesn't necessarily lead me to some cathartic feeling where I let go of that feeling forever. But it gives me some space to see the feeling more objectively, and to see the feeling as an object that I am creating, and diminishing.
Yesterday, I felt like I had some kind of flu. It was vague, I kind of knew the feeling before from doing a food detox. I was feeling heightened irritation, impatience depression, and a heightened sense of the resistance I feel to these uncomfortable feelings. At times I felt just the resistance, which I guess I could describe as the kind of icky feeling I've sometimes experienced when doing mushrooms, or any kind of psychedelic. It's a feeling of poison entering, or sometimes exiting your body.
It's an uncomfortable feeling, but I've come to greet it with anticipation because I know that it usually means I'm on the cusp of letting go of some suffering, and experiencing some kind of deeper more sustaining joy.
Today when I did my meditation, for the first time in a while, I felt that deep joy. I guess I'm going to call it joyful wisdom. It's the feeling I have when I have connected with a universal energy, but now that there is more than just this moment of connection. I feel the pleasure and the awe and the gratitude. But I also feel the decision I have made to experience this feeling regularly and often throughout my life. At some point I made a decision to cultivate this practice. At some point I made a decision to deepen this practice. I did it. And now there is no going back. It is the joyful reward I feel at the commitment I made and kept and will always keep.
All that remains is to build and work the technology that increases this joyful wisdom for myself and brings this lasting happiness to others. This "technology" is lovingkindness and the wish to continue cultivating this feeling for myself, for my loved ones, for my neighbors, and even for my enemies. For all. The more I wish this, the greater my JW grows.
It has just hit me that these are my initials.
And that's the thing. We think that we are just our crappy, imprisoning feelings. We base our selves and our sense of self on those feelings and on the repression and eradication of those negative feelings. But we aren't those feelings. We are actually this infinite, huge, always available, fundamentally joyful wisdom. That is what we really are. Not the prison part.
Recognizing this should be easy. But we're used to the prison. It's our home. We're very attached to it. Sometimes the only way we get out of it is when something burns it down. But that's probably not the best way. The best way is to make the decision to leave, and then slowly and surely we move more and more stuff out into the better world.
Into the light. Which is our real home.
