The Force

Wonderful meditation this morning.

Yesterday I watched a video that reminded me of that six second time lag we have between when our brain makes a decision and we become conscious of the decision. It's hard to wrap our heads around the fact that we might not have free will.  And especially the idea that if we don't, why would this decision making energy make some of the poor decisions that it does?

But another way of looking at it is that we make some of the bigger decisions, based on reflection on previous decisions,  and our brain then makes the smaller ones.  One big decision we can make is to turn out lives over to the management of the energy that makes better decisions. This force field that created this magnificent world.

Combining some of the golden ball tai chi I'm recovering and the body scanning I've been doing in Vipassana,  I found myself this morning really being in a bigger, better energy. Really feeling what it would be like to let it manage me, and thus impact the lives of the people who depend on me.

For a good long while I felt this energy flip me around and take control.

May I continue today to be with this force.

The plan

My plan for returning to Zhan Zhuang is to start the way I would start if I were arriving at this blog for the first time, and starting the way I started almost 25 years ago, with Lam Kam Chuen's Way of Energy.

The plan is to stand five minutes a day this week, ten next, until by the end of the month I'm doing the regular twenty minutes, and by three months I'm back to an hour.

But I'm going to add something new.  A new Chuen book. His Qigong workbook for anxiety. While I don't tend to think of myself suffering from anxiety, I clearly do.  I had a terrible dream last night, in which my insecurity and reactivity lost me my job.  Of course this anxiety is at the root of all my cravings and bad habits. Bad habit are almost always a poor response to nervousness and fear.

Last night I noticed once again how hard it is for me to lie still in my bed and go to sleep.  There is a kind of terror that still grips me when I lie in bed. You'd think after years of meditation it would have ebbed, but it's still hard.

Chuen's approach is not to eliminate anxiety, but to work with it.  So here goes...

One More Times

It hurts to admit this to myself, here in this blog, a little over eleven years after it started it: I have abandoned standing. 

Slowly I let sitting meditation become my core practice, and I'm not entirely sorry I did that. But I have paid the price physically.  I have much in the way of spiritual, emotional and intellectual discipline, but I am sapped of that core vitality.  I barely have the discipline to go for a walk.  I weigh more than I've ever weighed in my life.  I am officially obese!

And I look old. I am middle aged, but I know I've aged tremendously in the last year. 

I know this has something to do with a very stressful, successful, but all encompassing year at work.  I know I've been eating poorly because I have the money to order in.  And of course, television.

But I know that getting back to standing will reverse this.  Or do I?

I believe that getting back to standing will reverse this.

Yesterday, I had the idea that it was time to turn this blog into a book.  It had occurred to me to change the name to disguise the fact that I was no longer standing.  Okay maybe not disguise, but acknowledge. But how can I write a book that ends with me feeling looking sapped?

Fine, I turned to sitting.  It's been amazing.  I've learned tons and broadened my study and of awareness.  But standing keeps me happy and healthy. It's my root practice and without it I'm vulnerable.

Also, I'm not sure Ben will ever embrace sitting meditation.  He's not in great shape these days either.  But maybe I could inspire him to stand.  He's so strong. I know it would make him feel more powerful.

So this is it.  Research for the last chapter. 

Returning home.

Book

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.

Mental Stability

Yesterday I went to a one day Vipassana retreat, a kind of booster shot for the 10 day course I took in September. Once again I was immersed in the power of equanimity.

Equanimity used to seem to me the dullest of the four qualities.  Intellectually I could accept that it was important, but who chooses equanimity over the more visceral sounding immeasurables like compassion, lovingkindness, and joy?  But more and more every year I see how none of those qualities can thrive without the underlying force field of mental stability.

Throughout this journey, from my first experiments with standing, to my sustained weeks of sitting, everything has been about testing and believing in the power of stability, stillness, unflinching balance.

For a long time I thought that balance meant never losing your footing, but I'm coming to understand that it means building and maintaining the ability to regain your footing.  Equanimity isn't just sitting still, although sitting still certainly helps.  It's also about being able to surf the waves of intensity, it's about the emotional and mental agility of non-duality, of liberating the mind from its constant self consciousness.

Above all it's about the strength and courage to sit with the hostility, the cravings, the inner habits from another time that risk de-stabilizing us.

Protect the dharma, says Goenka, and the dharma will protect you.

Waking up

This morning I felt the thing I've been wanting to feel most in the eleven years since I've been writing this blog.  I felt the lucidity of being awake interrupt the blah, blah story (as Gary Webber calls it) on its own.  I didn't have to consciously notice I was storifying.

I believe that enlightenment it the process of making this lucidity intuitive, a place that is not only easy to get to, but a place that the brain goes to almost immediately the minute it starts to feel the agitation and dis satisfaction that leads to suffering.

Programmed properly this dynamic will happen so fast we're not even conscious of the spark of suffering that would trigger it.

But you can't rush it. Decomposing suffering is a gradual process, and I think Webber is right that even if we invented a machine that could immediately shift us out of that part of the brain that keeps us in the grip of suffering, most people might not have the supporting skills, or live in a culture that could  sustain the peace. For many people it might feel more like dark night of the soul, than a liberation.

As I've learned this year.  I have a bot that will clean my floors, but there is something still strong in me that doesn't want to use it.  I have the technology, but it doesn't matter if the belief that I need and deserve a clean and pleasant home isn't strong in me.

I wonder, even if we had the power to implant something in our brains that would give us emotional intelligence and stability, would we have the ability to adapt to it? Would our society want to actually pay for this in a culture than cannot imagine an economy based on anything other than craving and manipulation of craving?

It's a good question, one we may even be facing in this lifetime.  But I will take Yuval Noah Hariri's advice, and continue to cultivate the two most important skills of the 21st century: emotional intelligence and mental stability.

Lucid Joy

What I'm feeling these days as I intensify my practice is close to what is felt when you wake up from a dull or distressing dream. A gratitude for my sanity, strength, grip on reality.

I'm keeping up my commitment to 2 hours of daily meditation.  I'm spending weekends mostly in self-directed retreat. I'm also following Mingyur Rinpoche's course on reality and reading a great book on the stages on emptiness.

In recent weeks I've been contemplating and meditating on how suffering cannot co-exist with wisdom.  Resting in the knowledge that there is a mind that is outside concepts of time and self, is deeply liberating. Lucidity grows every moment I stay in that place.

I love the intensity of Goenka's Vipassana technique, the constant and determined body scanning.  But I realized yesterday that I was missing something important.  Joy.  I'm still falling too easily to intense cravings for food and drama.  But gratitude added to equanimity makes hard for cravings to thrive.  Joy tells the mind and the body that we have enough. I think that cravings are a sign that life has become joyless, so the distorted pit of dis satisfaction grows.

Joyful wisdom is truly the antidote to most of what has plagued in my life.

May I not forget that. May I find a way to share that insight with others, especially Ben.