Leaning in, Sinking down

Last night I had one of the best stands I've had in a long time. I'd just finished the first day of a two day conference (Montreal WordCamp) and I was feeling that emptiness I sometimes feel when I've been around a group of people. Maybe I'm an introvert who feels drained around other humans. I don't know. Though I want human company, I often feel this profound feeling of depletion and despair afterwards.

Too often in the past I've dealt with this problem with distraction. I come home feeling empty. Then I fill the emptiness with food and television,which just makes the emptiness worse. And then I go into these social situations, that I want, from a feeling of vulnerability.

Last night was different. I've been working with thoughts and feelings in my meditation practice, and last night I decided to divide and conquer. I did some standing with my loneliness (made a little sharper by the fact that my son left for two weeks with his father.) I alternated this with a feeling of open awareness. I did some standing and sitting with smaller feelings, my aversion to cleaning the kitchen that I left a mess this morning, my frustration that my son had pulled out all the cable, internet connectors in an attempt to take his Playstation, etc.

I stayed with this feelings and felt the thinking feeling in my forehead, as I do more and more. Later in the evening I found the motivation to really stand for well over an hour.

I felt the warmth of this universal energy that is always available to me. I felt a voice telling me that I didn't need to choose this energy anymore. The choice had been made. I am this energy and I have chosen myself. The feedback loop is now a core part of me. No decision. It's just maintenance.

As I stood, the warmth began to sink and grow. But towards the end of the stand I began to notice different kind of energy. There was, not so much a numbness in my forehead, but an energy close to a neutral sense of being. Not the usual tension I feel there. Or the sense of relief when i've stopped living in that part of my brain. Just an energy, a presence.

Later I wondered if maybe this was what it felt when thought was in the service of awareness/attention, and not the other way around.

This morning as I was standing, I found myself getting distracted and pulled into the stream of thought. I reminded myself, as I've been doing the last week or so, to lean into this energy and then alternate it with open awareness.  But this time it occurred to me to lean in and then do what I'd always been doing in Tai Chi, sink down. Or rather position myself to allow the energy to sink of its own accord.

Lean in, sink down. I realized that this could be a very effective mantra for bringing my attention back to deeper core awareness.

When I sink, or position for sinking, I start to feel all the deeper parts of my brain, all the other lobes below and beyond this frontal cortex. I know my brain is getting deeper and stronger. And I know I'm becoming deeper and stronger as a result of this practice.

As I continue this, I will feel this strong desire to bring this connection to other people.

And then, as the end of a day or a conference, I'll feel less and less drained. More and more energized.

The loop, once blocked, is now open.

Scattered Mind Insight

Earlier this week, I watched a talk given by Shinzen Young at Google. He said something that hit me as a writer.  Insight when you have a scattered mind tends to be superficial, personal, and psychological. With a focused mind insight has more depth and spiritual weight.

I've never really considered how important the quality of the mind is to get insight to stay.  That sounds crazy now, because it's so obvious.  But I've tended to think of meditation as something I do for me, not something I do to make my insight more transmittable to the world.

Of course, because my mind is so scattered, I haven't been able to focus on the problem of focus, so it's a kind of a recursive problem.

Add to this the problem that I grew up in a family of scatter brains and suddenly I feel like I'm in "mid-mountain" with this meditation project.

Mid-mountain is a term I learned yesterday reading Malcom Gladwell. It refers to a famous transportation project in nineteenth century Massachusetts that ended up in massive cost overrun because they thought that it would be a lot easier to blast through a mountain than it was.  they known how much it was going to cost, they never would have gone ahead.  But had they not gone ahead, Massachusetts would not have been able to ship its goods so easily to the expanding West, and would never have become as wealthy as it it.

If I'd known how long it would take to get my mind in shape, I'm not sure I would have started this meditation project. If I'd known what I was eventually going to realize about myself, how truly out of control my mind really is, I wouldn't have had the courage.

But I'm here now with this meditation practice that I've been cultivating for years.  And I know there is a lot of insight there ready to be shipped out.

One day I will look back and know that the cost was worth it.

Thought

This month in the Joy of Living program I'm working with thoughts. I'm glad I've taken the previous two months to work on sound and objects, because at their most basic level thoughts really are sound and objects internalized.
  Not that I seem to be able to remember this in meditation.  I'm constantly drawn into the content of my thoughts. And the content of my thoughts are usually problems.
  Thought is a technology.  We developed it to solve problems, to create shared memory.  Eventually we became ennamoured with the beauty of thought made manifest, and that became art. Thought is mostly about problem solving and if we let it run on its own without slowing it down, checking it, letting it rest, we are in constant problem solving mode. We'll find problems where they don't even really exists.
  Meditation slows this down so that we can shift our brain outside of problem solving mode for a while. So that we can just be.  So that we can fulfill our purpose.  We're not actually here to solve problems.  We're here to witness and feel and experience this beautiful world, and to love each other and make life an experience full of awe and wonder.
  So, for the next few weeks I want to be like the father of  information theory, and seminal cryptologist, Claude Shannon, and act as though the meaning of the content is irrelevant. I'm going to listen to the sound of my thoughts, I'm going to watch the images, and feel the sensations.  Just follow along.

Objects

I had a crucial insight this week.

In Tergar's Joy of Living program we're meditating on neutral objects.  Mingyur Rinpoche suggests something in the distance like a patch of color on a wall.  He also describes a process by which our sense of distinction between self and object dissolves after a while.

I wasn't sure what he meant until I experienced it myself. For one meditation I picked a boring white square pattern on the apartment building outside my window. I steeled myself for what I was sure would be the dullest meditation I'd ever experienced.  But in time something happened.  I began to see the contrasting bricks and then the bricks that were diagonal to it. In time, I saw that pattern as a symbol of myself.  Solid, negative space around me, brick upon brick, held in place by gravity but able to hold people up way above the ground. The next day I had a similar experience with the excess cord on a clothesline.  I saw myself in time as that piece of cord, suspended in the sky.  Not heavy enough to fall.  But strong enough to stay in place.  I saw the perfect tension of the clothesline as the tension I need to maintain in my practice.

If I  see myself in nondescript objects, then surely I must see myself in everyone I meet.  If I'm feeling vulnerable and stressed and angry and closed hearted, then I'm going to see everyone as that.  But if my mind is strengthened and renewed by compassion and gratitude, then I'm more likely to see everyone around me as compassionate and generous.

Now the dedication I do at the beginning of my meditation makes sense. This meditation really is work I do for all beings. I'm more likely to see the good in people as a result of this practice, and in seeing the good in them, I'm more likely to feel good.  It's a positive feedback loop that in time develops its own momentum.

One day I will not have to work so hard at this.  And when I say I work for the welfare of others I will mean that I "work," in the sense of I function mechanically how I'm supposed to.  Like the clothesline, like the bricks, which I rarely notice, but for which today I am deeply grateful.