What I'm feeling these days as I intensify my practice is close to what is felt when you wake up from a dull or distressing dream. A gratitude for my sanity, strength, grip on reality.
I'm keeping up my commitment to 2 hours of daily meditation. I'm spending weekends mostly in self-directed retreat. I'm also following Mingyur Rinpoche's course on reality and reading a great book on the stages on emptiness.
In recent weeks I've been contemplating and meditating on how suffering cannot co-exist with wisdom. Resting in the knowledge that there is a mind that is outside concepts of time and self, is deeply liberating. Lucidity grows every moment I stay in that place.
I love the intensity of Goenka's Vipassana technique, the constant and determined body scanning. But I realized yesterday that I was missing something important. Joy. I'm still falling too easily to intense cravings for food and drama. But gratitude added to equanimity makes hard for cravings to thrive. Joy tells the mind and the body that we have enough. I think that cravings are a sign that life has become joyless, so the distorted pit of dis satisfaction grows.
Joyful wisdom is truly the antidote to most of what has plagued in my life.
May I not forget that. May I find a way to share that insight with others, especially Ben.
