I believe it's time to write a book out of all of this.
I've been feeling a shift in my practice since I started in the Goenka sangha. This community is so strong, I know that I have such sustained support for my ongoing practice now that impossible for me to imagine it being de-railed.
The tree is strong and stable, nothing short of an ice storm will kill it.
Yesterday I had a self directed retreat. No digital devices, just sitting in my growing sense of equanimity and non-duality. Ended the day with the Sunday night weekly one hour sitting in my neighborhood.
Didn't do much writing, but scratched out a mind map in my Zap book journal. Whenever I started to feel bored, I took the time to feel the anxious edgy emptiness beneath the craving for some new thought, some new idea. If I sit with it for a bit, the anxiety passes and what I'm left with is that lake of equanimity that Mingyur Rinpoche talks about. Just quite, peaceful openness. Just the raw joy of possibility. What is on the horizon for me if I'm not longer locked into these loops of conditioned obsession and neediness?
At the end of the day, walking home from my meditation, that recurring belief and fear, that it I don't give into the craving, it will rear up stronger. And yes it will, but then it will subside like a wave that's a little higher than the others, until it is low tide again. I need to remember the other side of that cycle. I need to remember it long enough, so that the cravings can start their path towards extinction.
This morning I woke up after that wholesome day with such a strong sense of this lake. It wasn't a perfectly still meditation, but there were some moments unlike any I've ever experienced. I felt a clarity, but it was like the clarity of underwater sunlight emerging between two caverns.
Eventually it settled into visions of lakes and lotuses. But it was different.
It felt like the beginning of a new adventure.
