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This morning was a watershed moment in my meditation practice.

It started with what are now the basics.  A dedication and focusing of my intentions to meditate for the well being of everyone.  A moment of open awareness where I rest my mind with the barest possible effort on the sounds that surround me.

I've been doing The Mirror meditation, which has resulted in a sense of being alone in a room, just me, the furniture, my bare awareness, of the furniture, and of my baseline discomfort--or as Mingyur Rinpoche calls it, "neuronal gossip."

After a minute or two, my awareness of sound began to sink into my throat, into an awareness of my vocal chords and how they have been shaped by the routine verbal abuse that surrounded me when I was young. How my voice in my head has so often mimicked and iterated that abuse, mostly towards myself, too often towards others. As the suffering of those body memories began to dissolve, I started to feel the natural compassion in my heart, the desire to be free of this conditioning and habits that have arisen as a result of that conditioning.

Suddenly I was angry.  But it was a good anger, a healthy anger, a self protective anger that did not have to be abuse, but could be a healthy assertion of my right to experience sustained love and joy. I could feel this strong, communicative anger rising into my throat. I could feel the promise and potential of this new confidence.

I could also feel myself shifting in my mediation practice from a desire to experience a state of being, a place of calm, an altered state of consciousness, to a desire to experience a process, a purification, or alchemization of my ordinary experience.  Not every moment had to be peace.  There could be authentic peace, even in anger.

And then it started. The noise. My landladies had picked this week to replace the fire escape. They are responsible, wonderful landladies, so the spiral staircase to be replaced was far from dangerous. It was, merely old and rusty, and noisy. My neighbours who are young use it often, especially in the middle of the night when they are coming home from parties, or bars. I can hear the vibrations of their half drunken ascents. It is a good thing that it is being replaced.

The workers had arrived with high power drills to bust up the cement to sink the posts of the new, shiny, solid black fire escape. Damn, I thought, for a moment, because my first instinct was to move, or end my mediation. I was having such a good meditation, really making progress. And then I didn't move.

I sat and listened to their Quebecois banter about the technical aspect of the project ahead. And sat some more, as the drilling started, and sat even longer as the drilling got louder and my entire apartment building shook from the vibrations.

I sat because it was so crystal clear to me what an amazing allegory this was for what was happening to me in this moment. There was the old cement like foundation of my mind, this way of seeing things that kept me in this endless recurring spiral going from one state to another, making progress, but never really getting anywhere, or so it felt.  I was tired of this climb.

And now there was this new more solid spiral staircase. On this new staircase I would be thinking less about where I was, what I was seeing, or what I was hearing, and be happier to simply experience where I was, what I was seeing, and what I was hearing.

Suddenly this sound and the feel of this drilling changed from a disruptive force that I would have once fled from without giving it a second thought, to a deeply therapeutic process. By the end of the day there would be a new foundation, and a shiny new escape route, or entry point. And it was all because of these wonderful workers with their loud, awesome drills. I could feel this process at the deepest levels of my soul.

A good meditation became a great mediation, maybe one of the most memorable meditations of my meditation journey, because of noise. Because of how I was perceiving this sound, it was like the best sound in the world. In fact so good that by the end of the meditation I found myself enthusiastically looking forward to a week of hammering and drilling and metal work. (They have to replace the balconies too!)

I'm often hesitant to declare a meditation experience foundational.  So many times I've written breathless accounts of states of being that I was sure meant that everything in my life would be better from now on in. And then I make another turn on the staircase and it feels like all I'm doing is looking back and not going anywhere.

But I'm yelling it from my balcony today. I've changed, and I will continue changing for the better, no matter how much every moment of the rest of my life may appear, on the surface, to be exactly the same.

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.

Happiness as default mode

I've made the switch.

This month I prepare for level three of Tergar's Joy of Living program. As part of the preparation we do an insight meditation called The Mirror meditation.  After preliminary relaxing of the mind, we "see"  everything in the visual field as though it we were looking into a mirror, as though everything that seems solid is really just a reflection.

The more I practice this perceptual mode, of looking at the world as though it were not as solid and real as it seems, the more I start to feel, at an experiential level, how transient my suffering is.  It feels as solid as a chair, a building, a city. But really it's not.

In ordinary awareness, and often in meditative awareness, I conceive of life as heavy, overwhelming suffering with transient moments of happiness and lucidity. That is the narrative my brain spins without any direction. That unfortunately has been, as it is for many people, my default mode.

But this week I am reversing this. This energy, this vitality, this state of being, this happiness, this warmth, this effervescence in my soul,  this is the solid ground.  The boredom, the anxiety, the lethargy, the despair, these are what come and go.

What is keeping that suffering rooted is my subconscious belief that the suffering is immutable, inevitable.

My intention this week is to catch this belief in action. Gently correct it and then get back to the default mode that I want to have.  The default mode I know have.

Joy.

I've Had A Dream

Last night I dreamt that I'd turned a corner, both literally and allegorically.  I dreamt that I now had the power to be happy, that depression was permanently behind me, like a very bad life long cold. From now on I was just on a permanent path of emotional health, joy, the ability to love and be loved, work hard and thrive and everything that comes with that.

I also dreamed that there was a new invention. It was 3D goggles that children wore in the car that would make the scenery look more interesting.  Make it look like they were driving through the best, most interesting city in the world.  I could see the world through the eyes of a child wearing these goggles. But what she was seeing was Montreal, the city I now live in.

I realized that what other people can only have through technological innovation and re-creation, I have naturally.

All I need to do is live my great life and appreciate it.

It's interesting that I have this dream during a week where I've been very much seeing my consciousness practice is a way to see what goes on in my head during the day as dream like.  Meditation trains you to wake up regularly throughout the day from the dream like stream in your head.  It helps me to sit for a moment and remember what it is I'd like to do if I had the power to do it.  Just like I do in lucid dreaming.

To wake up and regain my sense of purpose.

Faith

As my energy sinks farther into my core, I am forming some different ideas about faith. I used to think of faith as more of a thought form. Something you believed, in your head, and you stuck to out as a matter of committed principle. More and more these days  faith feels like an energy in my body, like a power. People who have faith, in a path, in themselves, in the society around them, have a kind of psychic energy. We respond to that energy because we want that faith.  We need that faith.
  Over the years I've cultivated faith in this meditative practice. I seem to learn slowly, but how else can you learn faith? You can embrace it as a hypothesis, but deeply rooted faith only develops once it has been tested again and again. Cultivating energy in my core has paid off for me again and again. Resting in my faith feels natural, if I let myself do that.
  But I still struggle with my undermining doubts. Recently I've started using a technique recommended by Martha Beck. Sit with that doubt and feel it as false. Then sit with the faith and feel it as true.
  In meditation this morning I let that true feeling sink into my gut. I can root that feeling and make it such a core part of me that I will have to devote less and less energy into believing in myself.  That belief will be locked in. And as I use it to nurture belief in others, it will only grow.
 

Sinking into my gut

I've spent a long time, during this process of letting my energy sink, resting in my heart. There is so much numbness in there, so much work that still needs to be done,  that I haven't wanted to leave. Yesterday I had an emotional/physical insight into hatred.  I could feel a layer of hatred in my heart, and then underneath, in an actual physical place, I could feel the desire to be free of that hatred.  I could feel that desire to be free, my compassion, in a place deeper.  And that's when I knew that the hatred would never last.  Things sink, and one day that hatred would simply dissolve into my much deeper desire to be free of it. I would like to continue this project of mapping out the heart.  Locating feelings, especially the positive ones when I feel them. And perhaps I will.
  But I sense that my heart is telling me it's time to move on, and move down my body into my tan tien. Moving down into this place feels like a rooting process.  I'm allowing this energy of an open heart to now move down my body into the earth of my liver, of my lower body. That's where the blocks dissolve, that's wear the toxins get cleansed. I'm going to take my time.  I'm going to take it slow.  Resting in my Tan Tien is a very intense experience.  Alot of feelings will emerge.
  But here lies wisdom.

Writing from the heart

Feeling this new, growing energy in my heart, means I feel more compelled to live from my heart. I trust that if I sit with this energy in time I will feel a place of completion, joy, reverence.  A state of being.

But how do I write from this.  Last night I was watching a television show with that standard scene, which we've all pretty much seen a milliion times now.  A piano teacher tells a student that their playing is too perfect, too intellectual.  They need to feel the pain and play from that.

I've tried to do that in my writing, but it never seems to work. My heart feels numb and self-conscious when I do that.  But I suppose naming the numbness and the self-consciousness is a start. My own heart is so muddy and chaotic it feels like, and my environment continues to reflect that even if I know I've made a lot of progress.

Like it or not, there is squalor in my heart.  Light squalor, but squalor nonetheless.

In the television show, the character worries that he has no pain to draw from.  He lives with loving, politically correct, lesbian parents.  Meanwhile, he's forgotten that his father is an embarrassing, lonely alcoholic, who had has distanced himself from.

I sit with my heart  and feel years of numbness.  And I worry that I will never unfreeze all these blocks.

But that numbness is there because of pain.  A lot of pain.  I will never have to worry about not having pain. Pain is good.  Suffering is bad. The resistance to pain, the mechanisms by which we dull the pain.

I don't want to feel that numbness.

A few years back, I found places in the energy centre in my head  that were full of depression and anxiety. Now I'm feeling them in my heart.  Or not feeling them, but I know I'm working my way there.