The Perfect Pond

I'm in Maine this week, at a cottage my parents have rented. The place is so idyllic it's almost a cliche. Outside my bedroom is a pond with lily pads under old arching trees.  In the distance on the other side of a very thin peninsula is the ocean.

This morning I meditated at sunrise. You'd think it would be easy to achieve that blissful connection in such a setting. But what I find the more beautiful and perfect the setting, the more I feel that stress inducing urge to grasp at it. To start thinking, how can a now, knowing such a beautiful place, be happy in my old place of meditation with its morning traffic and beeping street light for the visually impaired.

The first trick  is to get to the twenty minute mark, the point at which the silt of our normal stress begins to settle. I know I've reached it when I have that familiar restlessness, and boredom, an almost psychic itching that makes me want to leap up and out of this pose.

Then I do what Shinzen Young calls recycling the emotion. Take the restlessness, be with it and wait for it to pass. It's basically a recursive function applied to emotion.

Eventually I reached the insight that there is no point grasping to keep this place. The best way I could use it to deepen my meditation, was to rest my awareness with the same lightness as I would on any other day, in any other normal place.

Once I did that, the whole space opened up.

I am here this week to realize that I do have power in dealing with the emotional complications of my family. Part of that power is realizing where I am powerless, and where I should probably remain powerless.  I cannot stop my parents from fighting.  I cannot make them more loving with each other. They don't want my mediation.  I  only have the power to decide whether or not I want to trigger a fight, or step away from a fight that I have become involved in.  I do not want to start any fights. I do not want to continue any fights this week. Nothing,absolutely nothing, is worth fighting over in the beautiful place.  So if my mother acts irrationally, or unfairly, I don't have to protect myself.  I don't have to play the vulnerability card. I'm simply not as vulnerable as all that. I am more than this little node of selfness that lives in my brain. I am also everything that I'm connected to.

I will step away from all fights this week. I will not be drawn into them.  I will not add to them.  I will not involve myself in the fights of others.

The decision has been made.

Joyful Wisdom

This month I'm practicing specifically with feelings.

I start a formal practice in open awareness then I shift into being aware of whatever feeling comes up.  I try and notice the story lines and the images. If a feeling is really overwhelming I see if I can drop some of these story lines, images, and thoughts associated with it, so that I can be, in compassionate abiding, with the root feeling. No matter how difficult, eventually it passes.

But it's hard. Very hard for me, because I grew up in such an emotionally complicated family, so I become very easily lost in my feelings and memories. One thing I've been trying is from an old book I've had around for a long time, The Power of Mind. I try to remember the first time I ever had that feeling. I find this really helpful in locating the emotion in the body. It doesn't necessarily lead me to some cathartic feeling where I let go of that feeling forever. But it gives me some space to see the feeling more objectively, and to see the feeling as an object that I am creating, and diminishing.

Yesterday, I felt like I had some kind of flu. It was vague, I kind of knew the feeling before from doing a food detox.  I was feeling heightened irritation, impatience depression, and a heightened sense of the resistance I feel to these uncomfortable feelings. At times I felt just the resistance, which I guess I could describe as the kind of icky feeling I've sometimes experienced when doing mushrooms, or any kind of psychedelic. It's a feeling of poison entering, or sometimes exiting your body.

It's an uncomfortable feeling, but I've come to greet it with anticipation because I know that it usually means I'm on the cusp of letting go of some suffering, and experiencing some kind of deeper more sustaining joy.

Today when I did my meditation, for the first time in a while, I felt that deep joy. I guess I'm going to call it joyful wisdom. It's the feeling I have when I have connected with a universal energy, but now that there is more than just this moment of connection.  I feel the pleasure and the awe and the gratitude.  But I also feel the decision I have made to experience this feeling regularly and often throughout my life. At some point I made a decision to cultivate this practice. At some point I made a decision to deepen this practice. I did it.  And now there is no going back.  It is the joyful reward I feel at the commitment I made and kept and will always keep.

All that remains is to build and work the technology that increases this joyful wisdom for myself and brings this lasting happiness to others.  This "technology" is lovingkindness and the wish to continue cultivating this feeling for myself, for my loved ones, for my neighbors, and even for my enemies. For all. The more I wish this, the greater my JW grows.

It has just hit me that these are my initials.

And that's the thing. We think that we are just our crappy, imprisoning feelings. We base our selves and our sense of self on those feelings and on the repression and eradication of those negative feelings. But we aren't those feelings.  We are actually this infinite, huge, always available, fundamentally joyful wisdom. That is what we really are. Not the prison part.

Recognizing this should be easy. But we're used to the prison. It's our home. We're very attached to it.  Sometimes the only way we get out of it is when something burns it down.  But that's probably not the best way. The best way is to make the decision to leave, and then slowly and surely we move more and more stuff out into the better world.

Into the light. Which is our real home.

Alternating

This month I'm working on my feelings as objects of meditation. In this practice the idea is to alternate from the intensity of a feeling to the release of open awareness. Almost like a toggle. As I practice this, eventually the feeling begins to diminish on its own.

One of the things I have a tendency to forget when I'm doing this is to alternate. I'm good at staying with the feeling.  I stay with it until the feeling passes on its own accord, or something distracts me.

This is okay with small feelings.  But bigger feelings--angers, anxieties in times of crisis, deep sadnesses I've been avoiding--still seem to have a lot of power over me, and it's easy to end up back on the ratwheel of bad habit that I've developed to deal with them.

So this month I want to work on divide and conquer.  When I'm feeling the big emotions this month (and life is really good at presenting you with big situations for this practice, which I won't go into now) I'm going to do formal practice.  Open awareness.  Feeling. Open awareness. Diminished feeling. Open Awareness. Whisp of a feeling.

And then move on to some constructive action or work that is improving my world and the world around me.

Enjoyment

In Eckhart Tolle's vision of a New Earth, enjoyment replaces wanting as the driving force. I want to be a part of that new world, so I'm trying these days to focus on what I enjoy, and to allow that to be the thing that organizes my decisions.

I enjoy the same things most people do, interesting experiences, conversations, travel, delicious food.  But if I had to answer the question what I enjoy more than anything, it really is the feeling I get when I'm meditating. Feeling that vitality in my gut, the warmth at the back of my neck and down my spine, that gravitational beam when I assume a natural posture that connects me with the universal force. Without that, all that I enjoy is merely craving and escape.

If I'm going to move forward in life, I have to give myself permission to enjoy this state of being as often and as fully as I want.

The crazy thing is that I often don't want it.  I often don't want to do this thing that I truly enjoy.

Maybe that's because I'm still in the state of wanting.  I keep thinking about all the things I don't have and want. To be a successful writer able to make a comfortable income. To be an influential teacher, able to inspire people towards a better way of living.  To be a better parent, able to raise a son who will want to contribute something to the world.

I won't be able to do any of that if I can't enjoy life.  If I can't enjoy the feeling of being alive.

To be motivated by enjoyment rather than want is a decision.  It's not a hedonistic decision, because I'm not being motivated by pleasure.  I'm being motivated by the joy that arises from being at peace in the world. And there's a lot of pain to be faced and worked through to get to that enjoyment.

But I'm going to do it.  The decision has been made.