This morning during my stand I felt joy.
There was peace, there was vitality, there was all the quiet energy I always feel when my standing practice is at the one to two hour commitment. And then underneath it I started to feel some of the numbness I've been feeling over the last couple of years begin to dissolve. And there it was. Natural joy.
In the past when I've reached this place I usually have some kind of neurotic reaction that goes something like this. Oh man. All that time wasted doing whatever it was I was doing when I could have been cultivating this happiness. What's wrong with me? Why can't I do the right thing all the time? Why do I let myself get sidetracked. Why do I undermine myself?
But recently I've understood something. It doesn't really matter what I did, or didn't do last year, or the year before. All that really matters is how I'm feeling right now, and what I'm doing right now. And when I'm in the place, really in that place, and truly committed to that place, I don't look back over my life anymore as a series of failures. My biography is simply the record of how I got to this good place. And how I got to this place is a steadfast habit of returning to it.
This place is my true north. I will always return to it inevitably, so I really need to let go of the remorse and the regret.
You can't hold on to natural joy. But you can return to it.
Again.
And again.
