The Trick

You can't feel self loathing and love together for very long. Eventually love wins. The trick to life is to take the accumulated stress, disappointment, fear, regret, whatever sad and painful feeling you hold in your body and brain and to make the very so slight adjustment that makes this food for consciousness, instead of food for more of the same.

I grew up in a household of hate, and I see how everyday is a choice for me between passing that hatred, and the habits of hatred--constant bickering, fighting, power struggles--and cultivating love, and the habits of love --acceptance, openness, peace building.

It starts in the morning, in the alchemy of my practice where I stand with these painful, tight, disabeling feelings, and I just allow presence to loosen them and start working with the warm energy of chi, bodhicitta, whatever one wants to call it. If I can do that consciously every day, in time my body will begin to do it without my need to sit there and give it instructions.

This is the process of enlightnment.

the growth forest

It's been about a month since I started this commitment to early morning zz and regular writing about it.

I expected change. I expected a steady a progress of building of chi. But, of course, that's not exactly what happened.

I've made some progress, but I've also experience what I supposed would call setbacks, but are merely the psychic knots of energy that always arise to undermine my practice if I choose to allow them to drive me.

Simply making the tension go away is not really the strategy that feels right. Just being with it, just knowing the familiar pattersn and getting up and standing anyways, even when I can barely focus on the changing light, let alone my tan tien.

Being with them, familiarizing myself with them is the first step, I hope, to loosening their hold. Yesterday for instance I sat with all the anxiety I've been feeling about this decision to send my son to a more challenging school against the advice of a young neuropsychologist. I still don't know if it's the right decision. He had a rough first year, but he seems to be doing better, making friends and enjoying the school. But we need to ask for services and its possible the school board will find out about the recommendation I ignored.

So there's the whole mix of anxiety, and guilt and possible shame, that is really as much about my own bad school experiences as my son's. I don't know what to do anymore except sit with it. Acknowledge that there is this whole nest of anxieties and I don't know where they started, where or if they will ever end. But they're there and they will probably return. And the best I think I can hope for in my project to "change" is to be more aware of them. To be able to continue working on my well being and be able to say, yes those are my school neurosis returning. Oh well. I'm going to stand and hope for the best, and do what I can.

It's not this steady progression of energy and power. It's more like being confronted by the fact that before you can renovate, first you need to toss all the junk in the basement.