This morning was a watershed moment in my meditation practice.
It started with what are now the basics. A dedication and focusing of my intentions to meditate for the well being of everyone. A moment of open awareness where I rest my mind with the barest possible effort on the sounds that surround me.
I've been doing The Mirror meditation, which has resulted in a sense of being alone in a room, just me, the furniture, my bare awareness, of the furniture, and of my baseline discomfort--or as Mingyur Rinpoche calls it, "neuronal gossip."
After a minute or two, my awareness of sound began to sink into my throat, into an awareness of my vocal chords and how they have been shaped by the routine verbal abuse that surrounded me when I was young. How my voice in my head has so often mimicked and iterated that abuse, mostly towards myself, too often towards others. As the suffering of those body memories began to dissolve, I started to feel the natural compassion in my heart, the desire to be free of this conditioning and habits that have arisen as a result of that conditioning.
Suddenly I was angry. But it was a good anger, a healthy anger, a self protective anger that did not have to be abuse, but could be a healthy assertion of my right to experience sustained love and joy. I could feel this strong, communicative anger rising into my throat. I could feel the promise and potential of this new confidence.
I could also feel myself shifting in my mediation practice from a desire to experience a state of being, a place of calm, an altered state of consciousness, to a desire to experience a process, a purification, or alchemization of my ordinary experience. Not every moment had to be peace. There could be authentic peace, even in anger.
And then it started. The noise. My landladies had picked this week to replace the fire escape. They are responsible, wonderful landladies, so the spiral staircase to be replaced was far from dangerous. It was, merely old and rusty, and noisy. My neighbours who are young use it often, especially in the middle of the night when they are coming home from parties, or bars. I can hear the vibrations of their half drunken ascents. It is a good thing that it is being replaced.
The workers had arrived with high power drills to bust up the cement to sink the posts of the new, shiny, solid black fire escape. Damn, I thought, for a moment, because my first instinct was to move, or end my mediation. I was having such a good meditation, really making progress. And then I didn't move.
I sat and listened to their Quebecois banter about the technical aspect of the project ahead. And sat some more, as the drilling started, and sat even longer as the drilling got louder and my entire apartment building shook from the vibrations.
I sat because it was so crystal clear to me what an amazing allegory this was for what was happening to me in this moment. There was the old cement like foundation of my mind, this way of seeing things that kept me in this endless recurring spiral going from one state to another, making progress, but never really getting anywhere, or so it felt. I was tired of this climb.
And now there was this new more solid spiral staircase. On this new staircase I would be thinking less about where I was, what I was seeing, or what I was hearing, and be happier to simply experience where I was, what I was seeing, and what I was hearing.
Suddenly this sound and the feel of this drilling changed from a disruptive force that I would have once fled from without giving it a second thought, to a deeply therapeutic process. By the end of the day there would be a new foundation, and a shiny new escape route, or entry point. And it was all because of these wonderful workers with their loud, awesome drills. I could feel this process at the deepest levels of my soul.
A good meditation became a great mediation, maybe one of the most memorable meditations of my meditation journey, because of noise. Because of how I was perceiving this sound, it was like the best sound in the world. In fact so good that by the end of the meditation I found myself enthusiastically looking forward to a week of hammering and drilling and metal work. (They have to replace the balconies too!)
I'm often hesitant to declare a meditation experience foundational. So many times I've written breathless accounts of states of being that I was sure meant that everything in my life would be better from now on in. And then I make another turn on the staircase and it feels like all I'm doing is looking back and not going anywhere.
But I'm yelling it from my balcony today. I've changed, and I will continue changing for the better, no matter how much every moment of the rest of my life may appear, on the surface, to be exactly the same.
