I don't know where to begin.
This retreat is not unfolding as easily as it usually does. Maybe because I stopped doing my insight practice a couple of years ago. But also some things in my life.
Easter dinner canceled because my parents had a blowout. Ben doing poorly in school. My work seems to be going well. Though little progress with my book. Also, I've let my running really fall off in recent months.
The end result after hour four of meditation is that I feel like I've got a few tons of impacted anger in me. Hour one was nice. Hours two and three were bearable, if unfocused. Hour four is like sitting with a burning rock of coal in my tailbone.
Something's got to give.
Also, I've been reading Sapiens, a book about how destructive our species is, with our too often self-rationalizing stories. It's hitting me how much suffering there is in the world, and around me. And how much my own life has been a repeated effort to justify the narrative of progress, when there isn't much evidence that we are progressing. At least, according to Sapiens.
Apparently, Yuval Noah Harrari author of Sapiens meditates at least two hours a day and goes on a two-month long retreat every year.
Hour five was, again, more anger; but something interesting happened. It began to pulsate and grow and I could feel very clearly the pleasure that anger, particularly the anger I feel towards my mother was. Anger does give pleasure when we reach a certain state. If can make us feel strong and make us feel clear. It can alleviate fear. At least for a while.
In hour six I returned to this anger I felt towards my mother and had an interesting insight. I see my mother as an object that I think I know, that I think produces these burning aversive feelings in me as a matter of course, as though she were some kind of poison rock that necessarily produces a particular side effect. But of course, she isn't. She's a multiplicity of values, drives, states of being, sometimes hateful, sometimes kind. I'm the one that is producing the poison in my ingrained reaction to thoughts of her and memories of her. I don't have to feel this way if I don't want to. I don't have to see her as one solid reality and I don't have to experience her as that. This was very liberating and soon enough I started to feel that magnetic, solid feeling peace. And then it got really interesting. I could feel myself rejecting the peace, as though some kind of aversion was magnetized into me to reject this peace at a certain point. I could see how this was habitual and that if I were to choose to recondition my response I could live more easily and more sustainably with peace.
Later: I sat in this repulsion place for a while, informally. And gradually it seemed to shift from a repulsive energy to a magnetic attraction energy. I know I'm sounding annoying new age, no doubt. But I suddenly felt all kind of new things could be possible if the core of my consciousness was pulling in peace and love, instead of repelling it.
Something to continue working on tomorrow.
