Stillness Saves

Tolle writes that stillness will save the world. I don't know if that is true. But stillness is saving me. Every morning I wake up and stand, stillness grounds me. It builds a hub of awareness in me. If I make a conscious effort to pay attention to the silence and to the post of energy that holds me up, I feel the particular pleasure of stepping out of mental conditioning. If for whatever reason, I forget to do that and start getting lost in my thoughts, stillness is still there working its way through my body, working its way through my psyche. As long as I maintain a strong devotion to stillness, I will lose myself less and less in the things that are weakening me, consumer culture, ego driven careerism, entertainment overload. I will return again and again to that place in me that is a rest from all of that, and in time none of those things will have the power to drive me.

Timelessness

It happened this morning, this timelessness I've read about. I started standing at 6:30, and it was like the next minute I looked up and it was 7:15.

This has much to do with a decision I made yesterday to think of the real me a pure awareness and not this conditioned thinking. To not see meditation as an escape, but to see thought as the escape. This doesn't mean that to be myself I have to spend all day standing. It just means that I need throughout the day to regularly take the time to be still, so that my thoughts serve me rather than drive me.

When I really spent this meditation coming back to my true self, standing quiet, listening to the morning silence, deeply still, all the usual markers of time--boredom, the urges to get back to important thought using tasks--lessened. There was no need for time. There was just now.

An exciting thought

"When you become aware of silence, immediately there is that state of inner still alertness. You are present. You have stepped out of thousands of years of collective human conditioning."

I've been reading Eckhart Tolle's Stillness Speaks. Tolle believes that stillness will save the world. This is a hard thing for me, child of busy journalist/activist/professor types, to accept. That is might be inaction, not action that will create a better world. But what Tolle says, what he conveys about the excitement of stepping out of conditioning, speaks deeply to the heart of my practice. I have felt those moments, those thrilling moments of stepping out of the flow of habitual belief, routine, buzzing cravings and unhealthy worries. They are what keep me coming back to this again and again.

The day my anxiety died

A couple of years back I wrote a post about the night my depression died. I was standing, in the middle of the night, up because of some insomnia thing. Somewhere near the end of what had been an extremely relaxing, deeply calm stand, I suddenly felt this buzz of anxiety, and then the smokey despair of the chronic depression I'd been struggling with all my life. I felt it flare up, and then I pretty much felt it burn away, replaced by a deep sense of calm.

This isn't to say that after that day I never felt depression again. But I can say, that it's never driven me, or controlled me in exactly the same way since. I visit that murky path from time to time, but I know it's growing over more all the time.

Last week has been an extremely difficult one. My landlady gave me official notice that she's going to take back my apartment. Doesn't look, from what an experienced tenant's rights lawyer told me, that she has much chance of pulling it off. Still, I've been obsessively anxious about this for a week. It's been difficult to sleep, work, and very difficult to meditate. I've been in imaginary rental board hearings now for a week, and any actual rental board hearing is months away.
Today I stood. I heard my most compassionate voice reassuring me "you don't have to be driven by this obsessive anxiety. You don't have to be driven by this obsessive anxiety. You don't have to be driven by this obsessive anxiety. Obsessive anxiety helped you once. But it's not helpful to you anymore. You don't have to be controlled by this." Then I thought, who is this you that the voice keeps talking to. And I realized that I didn't want to think of myself anymore as the helpless person, who needs reassurance from a secondary voice. I thought "wait a minute. I'm the strong voice that's reassuring me. I'm not the child who needs reassuring anymore." So I started being this voice and I started hearing myself say: "I don't need to be driven by obsessive anxiety anymore." The voice got stronger and started to feel like more and more of a core part of my identity. Until it was.

For a while, just after that stand, I sat down. I started thinking about a time in my life when maybe that obsessive anxiety did help me. I thought of my childhood, always on attention. Always expecting my mother pounce any moment with some overblown irritation of some sort. I needed to be obsessively anxious, it felt like, to match her obsessive anxiety.

But she's not here anymore. This is my life. I'm not always doing something wrong. I'm often doing something right. Something healthy. Something smart. Something interesting. Something delicious. I don't need to be worried ALL the time. I don't need to be controlled by that worry.
This doesn't mean I'll never worry anymore. But I'm about to lose my home, one of the worst feelings in the world. And I'm up to it. I'm up to the fight of protecting myself and my son. And maybe, eventually I'll even feel secure enough to let my landlady have it. I'll see, once i'm more used to this knowledge.

My Job

It's snowing. A very late Indian summer is officially over. Hanging out with my three willows, feeling the abundance of stillness, I suddenly felt the stab of guilt. Of course I should be working. I have debt to deal with. Private school fees to save for. All that.

But then I felt that sense of paradox that I so often do when I'm standing. Things were so good this morning in our home. Peaceful, playful, everything moving smoothly towards Ben getting off to school. I could feel the consequences of regularly tending to my peace of mind. So it hit me in the park. However rushed, however stressed I am--this is my job. It is my job to plant this field of peace at the beginning of my day. It is my job to nurture the inevitable creativity and physical, mental and spiritual energy this time supplies me with. It's my job to cultivate this and to pass on the skills of this cultivation to my son and to my readers. This is my job and I have deep faith in its rewards and its renumerations.

worries

Last night I had a lovely stand. My body relaxed into that pure column of energy and I tasted timelessness. I was so sure that I was on a wide open path to peace. Then I watched the HBO show Enlightened. This is the story of a naive woman coming back from a retreat in Hawaii. She's stuck on the hamster wheel of work, and she can't get off because she's in debt.

Me. This morning all I can feel is a column of anxiety. Financial anxiety mostly. How, I wonder will standing help me with my debt? Will psychic and physical energy translate in financial success? Will I reverse this trend. Or am I just escaping?

I'd like to think that in standing I'm facing up to what my body is telling me. That there is entrenched worry in me that needs to be faced. But standing also tells me that this worry does not have to be the core of my identity. I'm feeling anxious this morning. Tonight, I may feel better. I don't want to duck my head in the sand, but without faith in some kind of energy in my life--a kind of energy that won't put in anymore debt than I am, since standing is free--I won't have the energy to face and deal with this problem. So I can't run away from this anxiety and escape into my other habits, food, T.V., etc. I need to stay with it.

The paradox of no change

I started this blog as an investigation of how I would change after six months of daily practice. But today I wonder if the most profound change I could undergo might be to lose this craving for self-improvement.

Reading last night about the concept of maitri, self-acceptance in Buddhist talk. A large part of meditation is being able to accept the source energies beneath our proliferating negative thoughts. Can I stand with my boredom, my loneliness, my self-loathing and not seek to eradicate these things. Just be with them.

I tried this morning, and an interesting thing happened. I felt the paradox of accepting my self-hatred. I felt what it felt like to be unconditionally loved by myself, even when I didn't love myself. Eventually the pleasant magnetic energy of standing took over. But when distractions came back, as they inevitably do, I was more easily able to deal with them, when I followed them back to the painful energy beneath them, and just stood in it. Just felt them like knots in my bark. Just part of who I am. No big deal.

So much of self-improvement is self loathing. So much of that industry is an exploitation of self loathing. To just be with ourselves, just accepting this self-loathing as a part of us--for today, or for however long, may be the most liberating change that we can take.