Wisdom

This week I start Joy of Living 3, which is about cultivating wisdom.  I've been re-reading this year's old posts and notice a mistake that I made in writing that wisdom was having a conceptual awareness of how things work.  In fact it's the opposite.  Wisdom is going beyond a conceptual awareness of how things work. Wisdom is having an experiential awareness of power and powerlessness and knowing how to choose power.

Many years ago, in my late twenties I had a series of disturbing dreams that led me into psychotherapy.  I'd been experimenting with lucid dreaming, waking up in my dreams, cultivating the ability to fly.  But somehow this power started to grow out of control.  I started to feel it in my daily reality and it terrified me, this magnetic energy.  My psychotherapist asked me why I was giving so much power to a force outside of myself.  Gradually I stopped being aware of it, my neurotic symptoms abated, and discovered a gentler form of this magnetic feeling energy in tai chi.

But it hit me yesterday that this power was never outside of me.  This power was in me.  This was a concrete experience of how powerful my mind was. For some reason I wasn't ready to own that power.

I am now.  But when I say that there is a danger of it sounding narcissistic.  I don't mean by this that I alone have this tremendous power.  I believe this power is a sort of commons.  A shared power that is accessible to all and that anyone can harness as long as the rules are respected.  This power is both a place and a self that we all share, only too few people know of its existence.

Every day now I spend more and more of my time in this place, resting, drawing from the source and giving back by sharing this knowledge and bringing this energy into all I do, whether it's writing my book or keeping my home tidy and liveable.

In cultivating this power for myself I cultivate it for everyone.  And in cultivating it for everyone, I cultivate it for myself.

And it is an actual, real power, not a concept.  I can feel it, I can breathe it, I can taste it.

And I can make it last.

Power

This week has been big week in my spiritual journey.  I'm feeling a tremendous wakening of chi, kundalini, bochicitta, whatever it is.  It's more powerful in me than it's ever been.

It started about a week ago with a fluttering in my throat.  I'd been working on resting in the energy of my Tan Tien and then suddenly I started feeling this energy in my throat, like a trapped butterfly.  I started to do a little research into throat chakras, and decided that this must be energy that is moving up, unblocking my very tense vocal chords.  Resting in my vocal chords brings back a lot of childhood memories, not all good. So much fighting in my family, harsh words, abuse.  This was a good opportunity to work that through.

Once the energy in my throat was worked through, I discovered an effervescence, that I suspect is the "taste of purification" that Shinzen Young talks about. 

This is apparently a watershed moment in meditation, when you shift from meditating to have states of being, towards meditating as part of a process of purification.  In this state you are content to face your pain, your suffering, your circumstances because you realize that the way you are experiencing this pain will make every future moment of your life better.

There are blocks, I know, to my power an energy.  But I'm feeling more and more everyday that I'm working my way through them.  I'm running, I'm eating better, I'm feeling better.  I'm still feeling blocked in my writing, but I'm feeling confident that this can change.

There are perceptions and misconceptions that keep all this stagnation in place, and I know I probably don't see them yet.  But I will.

It's going to be an exciting six months. Looking forward to finding out what's on the other side.

Listen

Lately the wise, smart, advising voice in my head has been shouting:

LISTEN

I listen, and nothing is said.

It's taken me a while to realize that what it wants me to listen to is the silence.  I am having gaps in between thoughts.  This scared me at first, but this morning I realized that this is an amazing process.  Gaps are moment of awareness, rests between notes.  Gaps are where the magic happens and one's truest sense of self is born.

Gaps are a place for me to place my hands over my navel and ground my energy.  They are a place for me to restore my energy.  They are my brain unhooking from the stress, the past, the conditioning.

Gaps are power.

Gaps get bigger if you let them.

Inner power

In my last post I kind of tossed off inner power as though it should be an addendum to character. But no, let me take that back. Character is something that should grow out of the natural confidence that comes from a strong sense of our inner vitality.

For many years in my practice I've seen vitality and chi as something that exists outside of me.This probably has a lot to do with the dyspraxic thinking that always has me seeing power as and outside thing. Something I need to either surrender to or flee.

Until I can surrender to the power inside of me I'm probably never going to lose this nagging anxiety that continues to block me from getting the things in life that I need and want.