Sensations

Yesterday I did a one day Vipassana retreat.

How fortunate I am to have this strong sangha of meditators in this tradition that has had so much impact on the practice of meditation in North America.  Almost 40 years ago S.N. Goenka visited Montreal, his first North American lecture. The community he seeded grew into this strong and resilient charity that runs a beautiful retreat center an hour outside of Montreal, and then these one day retreats in the East End of the city.

Despite the 10 day retreat I did back in September, the two hours a day that I've been doing, and the one hour group sitting that's a 10 minute walk from my apartment, yesterday I feel like I finally "got" it.

Goenka's technique attunes you to the sensations flowing through the body, and cultivates the ability to look at these constantly changing sensations with calm alertness. I also cultivates the ability to see where these sensations are rigid, giving the impression of solidity and permanence.

Developing this intuitive relationship with our sensations, in their true impermanent and continuously changing state, helps us to develop emotional and intellectual agility. We make emotions out of our sensations, and then our sensations respond to these emotions.  It's how we get into these ruts.  Goenka's technique effectively deconstructs our emotional patterns so that we can start again.

This morning a 2 hour meditation flew by, largely because I was focussed on just being present and directly aware of the the flow of sensations. I had some moments where my mind flew off and started working out some work problems.  When I returned to my body,  all I had were these weak solid little spots of sensations and it became so clear how much the overthinking of life damages our ability to just feel it.

When it become more habitual to sit quietly with sensations, face them with equanimity, and be willing to be with whatever arises--be it warm sparkly vibrations of warmth and ease, or rock solid terror--then we are truly free to live.

Impermanence of Sensations

I'm midway now in the six month JOL3 program, where I'm trying to make these habits of wisdom intuitive.

This week I've been working on impermanence of body sensations.  But I'm admitting to myself at the end of the week that my practice on this has been somewhat impermanent itself.  There seems to be something in me that is quite resistant to this particular practice.  Probably because it starts with something that feels like pain.  But is merely discomfort.

The consquence of avoiding this practice though, is that I've missed out on a powerful lesson.  It's through these uncomfortable sensations that we reach a state of interesting, comfortable, buddah nature, or chi sensations.  Sensations of stability, stillness, lucid, clear energy running through us.  I guess I'll call them life force sensations.

I like to be in this energy, but one thing I've noticed more than usual this week is that I'm also uncomfortable with this energy.

What I realized this morning is that I'm uncomfortable with the impermanence of this more powerful energy. I'm uncomfortable with the fact that this energy is always in a state of flux.   But if I settle into that, if I watch this energy transform in the same way that I might watch television, suddenly my resistance begins to melt away.  I'm not so worried that I'm going to get sucked into some permanent loop because this energy is impermanent as well.

It's really just another layer of impermanence.

Power, Joy and Impermanence

Last week my answer to that what do I want more than anything in the world was power.  And yes, it's still power.  But also, I want joy.
  Joy's a little trickier though. Because joy is not a think you can have all the time, I think.  And neither is power really.  There is no power if you don't constantly confront your weaknesses.  There is no joy if you can't feel sadness, anger, despair, and its impermanence.
  What was it Tim Olmsted taught me back in the Joy of Living 3 course.  It was to feel the impermance within our painful emotions.
  Last week the focus of my meditation practice was impermanence of the body.  I logged a lot of minutes feeling the fact that this body, the health embodied in this body would not always be around.  My parents bodies are not permanent either.  Nothing is permanent and it hurts.
  But the hurt isn't permanent.
  Joy isn't a thing you can want and have.  It's an energy you feel when you realize that nothing you want is anything permanent that you can have.  What a waste of energy wanting can be it seems, since whatever you acquire will inevitably dissolve.
 But should we forsake joy because it will not always be ours?
 Joy is fleeting, but at the same time inexhaustible. We can drink from it again and again and again.
 That is the true root of power.

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.