Addicted to thought

I crave thinking. 

This week in meditation I felt that craving deeply, and when I did, a whole new path opened up. I guess I could call it a jhana.  But I felt the release that came from letting go of thinking and allowing all that is not thinking take over. 

Of course I've done this before, but I'm not sure I've ever really focussed as much as I did this week on the impulse to think.  

It was magical. 

I wonder how I can apply that to my writing.  This morning I saw my stack of old writing practice journals.  It's been so long since I tried to bypass thinking in my writing. I've been struggling with the BDW.  Maybe this would work. 

Self-directed Retreat Day 2

In my first hour of meditation today I had this insight.  Just as thought is impermanent, so is the consciousness and the life that is driven by thought. In my life, and I imagine in the history of humanity.  We are, right now, in a society wrapped up in the neocortex, as though this were the only part of the brain.  But the brain extends all throughout the body, and increasingly I believe that the most important part is the gut.

Certainly it's the most important part for physical health.  And wisdom, for me, begins with the decision to do what I can to stabilize my physical health.  So in hour two sitting with my Tan Tien was not the most comfortable feeling.  The neocortex feels like a safe abstract place.  But the gut is full of toxic, uncomfortable, sometimes weak feelings.  No wonder everyone wants to hang out in their brain.  Or at least that's where my habits bring me.

Hour three I decided to stand. But first I did a little reading from Bruce Frantzis Opening The Engergy Gates of Your Body. Somehow I seem to have skipped over the part where he recommends at least six months spent with an instructor, just on stabilizing the tan tien energies.  Longer if you're doing it alone!  Okay, well, I have spent about what now?  Twenty years?  I have made some progress.  But I've got some work to do to make it really stable.   I think this has something to do with the erratic parenting problem.  But I need to believe that I will get the stable love I didn't always get.   I stood for an hour and started to feel the hope that I can give myself this stable energy.

And then I can give it, to myself, to Ben, to my parents and my brother.  There are according to Mingyur Rinpoche four Buddah nature blockers, the first two being self-hatred and the second being hatred, or contempt towards others.  In hour two I started to feel the dissolution of my self-hatred, and finally in my belly joy.  A really nice joy that I reconized from the moment I learned I was pregnant.  This was a a creative, delightful joy, and if this is the kind of joy that tan tien generates than put me down for the next six month, or next twenty years.

Whatever, there is no time really. It's a fabrication, like sense of self.  And this is what I played with in hour five.  I love this freedom meditation that I learned in JOL3.   Letting go of self, and time, and with it agency. Once I let go of that I can feel the chi charting its own agency.  I got a big dose of self in the last 10 minutes, when I started to feel that familiar restlessness and craving.  But I decided to let the chi deal with that, and like a lovely, competent parent, it soon distracted me with a blissful warmth.  That is what will be driving me for the next twenty years, not my thoughts.

It's not that I won't have thoughts.   But I volunteer my life to the path that this energy will open up for me.

Leaning in, Sinking down

Last night I had one of the best stands I've had in a long time. I'd just finished the first day of a two day conference (Montreal WordCamp) and I was feeling that emptiness I sometimes feel when I've been around a group of people. Maybe I'm an introvert who feels drained around other humans. I don't know. Though I want human company, I often feel this profound feeling of depletion and despair afterwards.

Too often in the past I've dealt with this problem with distraction. I come home feeling empty. Then I fill the emptiness with food and television,which just makes the emptiness worse. And then I go into these social situations, that I want, from a feeling of vulnerability.

Last night was different. I've been working with thoughts and feelings in my meditation practice, and last night I decided to divide and conquer. I did some standing with my loneliness (made a little sharper by the fact that my son left for two weeks with his father.) I alternated this with a feeling of open awareness. I did some standing and sitting with smaller feelings, my aversion to cleaning the kitchen that I left a mess this morning, my frustration that my son had pulled out all the cable, internet connectors in an attempt to take his Playstation, etc.

I stayed with this feelings and felt the thinking feeling in my forehead, as I do more and more. Later in the evening I found the motivation to really stand for well over an hour.

I felt the warmth of this universal energy that is always available to me. I felt a voice telling me that I didn't need to choose this energy anymore. The choice had been made. I am this energy and I have chosen myself. The feedback loop is now a core part of me. No decision. It's just maintenance.

As I stood, the warmth began to sink and grow. But towards the end of the stand I began to notice different kind of energy. There was, not so much a numbness in my forehead, but an energy close to a neutral sense of being. Not the usual tension I feel there. Or the sense of relief when i've stopped living in that part of my brain. Just an energy, a presence.

Later I wondered if maybe this was what it felt when thought was in the service of awareness/attention, and not the other way around.

This morning as I was standing, I found myself getting distracted and pulled into the stream of thought. I reminded myself, as I've been doing the last week or so, to lean into this energy and then alternate it with open awareness.  But this time it occurred to me to lean in and then do what I'd always been doing in Tai Chi, sink down. Or rather position myself to allow the energy to sink of its own accord.

Lean in, sink down. I realized that this could be a very effective mantra for bringing my attention back to deeper core awareness.

When I sink, or position for sinking, I start to feel all the deeper parts of my brain, all the other lobes below and beyond this frontal cortex. I know my brain is getting deeper and stronger. And I know I'm becoming deeper and stronger as a result of this practice.

As I continue this, I will feel this strong desire to bring this connection to other people.

And then, as the end of a day or a conference, I'll feel less and less drained. More and more energized.

The loop, once blocked, is now open.

Thought

This month in the Joy of Living program I'm working with thoughts. I'm glad I've taken the previous two months to work on sound and objects, because at their most basic level thoughts really are sound and objects internalized.
  Not that I seem to be able to remember this in meditation.  I'm constantly drawn into the content of my thoughts. And the content of my thoughts are usually problems.
  Thought is a technology.  We developed it to solve problems, to create shared memory.  Eventually we became ennamoured with the beauty of thought made manifest, and that became art. Thought is mostly about problem solving and if we let it run on its own without slowing it down, checking it, letting it rest, we are in constant problem solving mode. We'll find problems where they don't even really exists.
  Meditation slows this down so that we can shift our brain outside of problem solving mode for a while. So that we can just be.  So that we can fulfill our purpose.  We're not actually here to solve problems.  We're here to witness and feel and experience this beautiful world, and to love each other and make life an experience full of awe and wonder.
  So, for the next few weeks I want to be like the father of  information theory, and seminal cryptologist, Claude Shannon, and act as though the meaning of the content is irrelevant. I'm going to listen to the sound of my thoughts, I'm going to watch the images, and feel the sensations.  Just follow along.

Letting the energy do my thinking

The last week instead of assuming postures, I've been starting from the first position and letting the energy build and direct my body. At a certain point my muse told me to simply let this energy do my thinking for me. For a short while my thoughts stopped chatting and I was able to simply be in this energy.

I felt that very strong field of magnetic energy. It began to loosen my shoulders and go into my upper back. I started to shake a little, like a mini seizure. And then at one point it was like my body filled up like one of those snowmen balloons. I was just this energy being there.

I felt the urge to scream, and started fooling around with the idea of a mantra. Eventually it morphed into Yaweh. I am.

It's a hard, hard thing for me ego to accept that this. Just this standing in this field of energy is such a strong and important part of our evolution. But I know it is. And I know that my rewards for this are deep and enduring. To become this energy. To let it direct my life towards more loving, useful behaviour. To do this is to be secure in the knowledge that abundance is always available to me.

Now it's time to stop worrying.