This has been a very intense month of meditation, study and reflection.
I've had some meditation experiences that have brought me to places where I've felt that my entire identity, personality, even body might dissolve. A couple of days ago, I was thinking about some disturbing tragic news coming out of the middle east, children murdered in the antagonism between the two states. I wondered if that deep, poisonous rancour would ever work itself out of their terrible feud. Then I felt something shoot through my heart, and there was this space. And emptiness, but not an arid emptiness. A clear, lucid, emptiness full of potential.
I still feel it. I could feel it even more if I wanted to intensify it.
But Rinpoche said something very interesting in this week's lesson. In your meditation practice it's important, as a general principle, to break up with your positive experiences "before they break up with you." He says this keeps your practice pure, and actually helps you in your next meditation.
I've been suffering this week with a bout of obsessive, bickering anger towards some people I've been working with. It feels to me like part of the pattern that I grew up with. It feels so solid and unmanageable. I feel like I'll never be able to work with people. That I'll bring my anger into every team I try and be a part of.
Then I feel like I'll end up wasting this grant and never get the writing I've dreamed of doing done. My emotional blocks run so deep.
But when they're gone, I can't imagine writing. It feels so foreign to me writing from a place of mild happiness. It feels so strange.
I wonder if I could actually live and write this way, just taking dictation from the place in my brain that is able to be so full of potential. So full of this joyful emptiness. It's what we dream us, we writers, just taking dictation from this place. But when we get there it doesn't feel quite right this effortless writing.
But it's what I'm going to do, so I might as well get used to it.
