The Source

Midway through my first week in Maine with my parents.  The honeymoon is over, and the tensions are already to starting to take shape.  My mother is disappointed that Ben doesn't want to spend time with other children on the beach. She feels frustrated, I guess, because she's done so much to try and cultivate this friendship this boy that Ben just doesn't seem to connect with.  I feel accused because Ben isn't socially confident. We had our first big fight over this.

I would love for this vacation to be an opportunity to work out some of my sense of powerlessness I have around my mother.  To see if the power I've been cultivating in my practice can really spill over into the most challenging part of my life.  But, I can't seem to avoid getting into a fight with her. And when I do the consequences are terrible.  It's one to two days of being ignored and judged and shamed. Last year this happened around my birthday, 50, a milestone and it was terrible. So empty and arid and painful.

If I could manage to get through this vacation with a feeling of genuine love and progress it would be such an accomplishment.  And it might help me to be more productive and happier next year.

But that might be too much to expect.

The one thing I need to accept is that I can't control my mother's behaviour, feelings or level of insight.  I can only modulate my reactions. I can for instance set a goal that I'm not going to get into an argument about Ben's interests, or what he should or should not do. I can do my best to respectfully listen to my mother's concerns and then I can let the conversation die a natural death. I'm not going to force Ben to do anything he doesn't want to do.

That said, I know my mother.  She is driven by something that tests the emotional will of everyone around her. There are never any easy answers to living comfortably with her.

All that remains now is the intention to use this as support for practice and compassion for my family and myself.

Breaking up with bliss before it breaks up with me

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.

Ambivalence, My Best Imaginary Friend

Tergar's JOL3 course has been something of a thrill ride.

A few days ago I was laughing hysterically about life in my "skin pocket." Today it's raining, I'm arguing with my son, and sifting through some of the same old annoying professional problems I've had all my life. Suddenly my life is feeling a little more mundane.  But to be honest, I kind of like it here.

In one of the webinars our instructors suggested having a default practice.  A practice we go to whenever things feel like they are hopeless and slipping away, and we're feeling lost again.

I'm thinking mine might be something of a take on Mingyur Rinpoche's making friends with his panic.

It's been a long time since I've struggled with panic.  So, I wouldn't consider panic to be my best friend, or best teacher anymore.

The emotional situation that has haunted my life has been ambivalence.  I grew up in a family of constant fighters and bickerers and that numb, muddy, lava like energy has haunted me all my life.  In Robert Boyce's wonderful book on writing he identifies ambivalence as the most popular reason for why writers have a difficult time writing.  They have ambivalence towards their writing, and whether they realize it or not, this is just an expression of their ambivalence towards life.

Recognizing ambivalence as my greatest emotional challenge, making very good friends with it and seeing it as a wonderful teacher may be my best and surest path towards greater, more sustainable wisdom.

Today I did a writing meditation that used this ambivalence as support for meditation.  I started in open awareness, listening just to sounds and feeling the ground beneath my feet and bum.  Then I felt that familiar ball of numb, tangled emotions in my gut.

I tried as much as possible to drop the storyline. I just felt the feelings.  As it the habit of my practice, I moved from those feelings towards some compassion, towards the desire to be free of whatever in those feelings was causing me suffering.  In time this energy rose into my brain and then towards the crown, where I start to feel my no more familiar place of selfless, timeless, spacious awareness.  A place which offers not much for the ambivalence to grasp.  Without time, without self, negative emotions can't stabilize.  All that is left is relief, calm, warmth, intelligence and life.

If  I can regularly connect with this feeling and rejoice in it, then I will have joy.  And joy, mild productive joy, is the best place to write from.  It's the place that readers want to be.  They want to feel this kernel and current of joy in the book that they pick up.   And I want to be a vehicle for that.

This seems to as good a default practice as I can get.

Skin Pocket

Had a very interesting meditation experience today.

As per my JOL 3 curriculum I've been meditating on timeless awareness.  It's been pleasant, and trippy, but eventually I decided to just rest in open awareness.

Soon I felt my energy begin to expand.  Really expand.  Expand to the point where I started to feel like a kind of giant spiritual jellyfish with a very thin membrane separating me from the timelessness, limitless ether, that is really who "I" am.

It didn't burst. But my consciousness started to ponder.  "So, what am I going to do for the rest in my life in this skin pocket."

Suddenly I started laughing and laughing.  "Skin pocket," I found myself repeating and again and again, each time sending me into another wave of helpless laughter.   As I returned to ordinary awareness, which now felt like it would never be ordinary awareness again, I kept imagining myself going through the rest of my life referring to myself as my "skin pocket."

It was so true.

That's all I really am.  Just a skin pocket for this consciousness inside me and outside me.

Hahahahaha.

Wonder if I'll ever stop laughing at this.

Freedom Meditation

This morning, sitting at my kitchen table. There was a very heavy rain, the end of a three day heatwave. Usually I try and run in the rain, but we don't get a lot of monsoon type rain in Montreal, so I decided to cut myself some slack and postpone my run until later.

Instead I sat and slowly remembered the directions to the Freedom meditation I learned from Mingyur Rinpoche last week.

I sat in open awareness listening to the rain.  Then I relaxed my mind into mirror meditation, recognizing the fruit bowl I saw in front of me as the two dimensional image that is what my eyes really see. Anything else I see is just my brain projecting and filling in from what it knows about the fruit bowl from past experience. The fruit is over there being fruit. I'm here, just me and my two dimensional image that seems a lot like the bowl of fruit, but isn't actually a bowl of fruit.  I spend some time resting in this analysis, hoping to make this knowledge intuitive.

Once I've rested in this,  I apply this same de-constructive process to my self.  I realize that whatever conception of self I have is really just fragments and projection.  So for the duration of this meditation at least, I might as well just let my sense of self go. I focus on my body. Years of chi kung practice have made me reasonably adept at blurring the boundaries between body and space. The ideal in Tai Chi and Chi Kung is to feel no real separation from your inner and outer world, so as I begin to scan and analyze my body, I start to feel parts of my body "disappear".  With that goes much of my sense of self as a physical entity. This is something that I'm kind of used to, so I don't think of it as "altered" consciousness. It's fairly easy for me to relax into this feeling.  Once I'm there I feel a kind of magnetic energy holding me together.  A sort of helpful scaffolding my psyche keeps so that I don't get too disoriented without my usual sense of body. As I rest in this, it begins to loosen and dissolve as well.

Once I'm feeling this sense of spaciousness. I start the deconstructive process on time.  In fact, from what I know, there's a 200 millisecond lag between when something actually happens as when the brain registers it as happening (according to one famous study, our muscles register our intention to act before our brain does-- which is really freaky when you think about it.)  Knowing this I can accept that any sense I have of the present as illusory.  The present is already over by the time my brain has registered it. And if the past is already over and the future hasn't happened, and the present is impossible to register in the actual present, then there's not much point paying attention to time at all.  At least not for the duration for this meditation.

Once I've let go of the fruit bowl, myself, and time, the next to go is any sense of agency.

Certain familiar fears come up about what an entire of life without any sense of agency might feel like. But I've decided to just watch them and let them dissolve, at least for the duration of this meditation.

With my agency gone, I relax into bare awareness.

A clarity emerges, but it's a kind of fluid, moving clarity. Something closer to what I would call lucidity, which I define as clarity with movement and power.  It's another kind of magnetic feeling energy, but with a more dynamic aspect. I've surrendered myself to it, so it kind of works its way through my system on its own, releasing me from inner psychic tensions, first in my head, then in my heart. There's a tight feeling I now label as "grasping", but it's not so much "me" grasping as remnants of myself back when it was grasping things. The process feels like a slow, steady inner massage of tensions that aren't there because I'm stressed, but because I was once stressed.  It's like a working through of the past to make room for whatever will happen in the future.

At some point this energy dissolves and is replaced by this a warm, then almost uncomfortably hot energy that starts pouring through my crown down into my gut.  Once this is over,  I get a very small stream of wet energy kind of in my lower back and the back of my neck.

At this point I become concious of the fact that while I'm aware of all these interesting, mostly pleasant energies in my brain and body, I'm not really feeling much emotionally.  I become conscious of the words of the dedication we repeat before every meditation. "May we have joy and a world at peace."

I remember, "joy and peace, yes that's something I want for myself and everyone."  So I set about wanting it and waiting for it to happen. Then I start to feel this familiar impatience that I've been working with all week. Earlier the week I had been trying to "make" impatience impermanent, but on Tim's advice I've been simply focussing on its inherent quality of impermance. Just knowing this quality is enough to start the process of dissolving.   I become conscious of the desire to be patient.  Until I remember that "patience" is a time-type word.  If there's no time there's not much point in being "patient" because there's no future. Plus even if it did happen it would be over by the time I'd actually experienced it.

Then it hits me, oh yes, I remember now.  Joy and peace.  These aren't states of being so much as qualities within me. They just haven't manifested.  But it doesn't matter whether they manifest now, or later.  All that matters is that they're here. Somewhere. And will show up at some point.  And when that happens I'll be aware of them, even if they don't last.

I don't have any sense of agency over this.  I don't need any sense of agency over this.  I'm content with my agency being limited to my awareness of awareness and of the qualities that will manifest one way or another.

It's around this time a kind of helium type energy start rising in me from below. But it's not a light gas type helium.  It's like liquid helium,  It rises very slowly and as it gets to my heart it starts to expand, which is kind of exciting but uncomfortable, because it's always possible my heart might burst.  Fortunately that doesn't happen. The energy starts to condense and make a solid home for itself in my heart, and then send more energy up through my throat and into my head and brain.  I feel a kind of rising feeling in my whole body. Not a levitation, so much as a extreme straightening up, which is a really nice confidence building feeling

A joy starts to emerge, but it's a nice practical joy.  The kind of joy you feel from a feeling of competence. Like  "rejoice! I've set up the circumstances for this lovely meditation." Once I've enjoyed this feeling I start to sense this is a good time to start heading back to ordinary reality.

It is after all, about 8 a.m., and I have a day of responsibilities ahead that don't really leave a lot of space for transcendant revelations of life beyond our normal misconceptions.  Even if I did feel more joy and deeper peace, what would I do with that?  Run through the streets chanting "it's so OBVIOUS, joy and peace are WITHIN."  I'm not sure people really want to hear that on their way to work. So I might as well start the cool down process.

I call it that because I've had my fair share of what Mingyur Rinpoche so charmingly calls "nervous breakthroughs", and I find that If I don't take the time to consciously return to something closer to ordinary awareness then it's really easy to get derailed by overexcitement.  Better to come down slowly than crash or fall.

Gently I return to open awareness. In Chi Kung we make three circles with our arms that mimic a kind of pushing down of energy above our heads back into our gut for safe storage and later use. I do that and then follow it with Tergar's closing dedication.

I would say that's it, but I do notice that my ordinary awareness feels infused with the power of this experience. And throughout the day, when I do eventually find the time to run, and when I'm doing routine activites, I'm able to recall this different kind of intelligence and gently shift into it.

It used to be that I meditated for altered states of consciousness, but I find myself less and less interested in that.  I'm more interested in tnis different intelligence, connecting with it, and connecting with others who are connected to it.  Kind of like adding my voice to a choir and hope that in time that choir gets big enough and resonant enough that even the most unenlightened of us will feel helpless not to join it.

I know that sounds like a very simple, Who-ville, philosophy of life.  But for today that feels liberating enough.