Radical honesty
I've been avoiding sitting. It's like medicine. I know it's really really good for me, but at the moment it tastes vile. Why should this be? Because of the honesty. Because I have to look at how I am. And I know, but don't want to know, that I feel like shit. So I've been dancing round the excuses. Yes, that could count as meditation, yes, it's ok just being a bit attentive to something or other.
Crap.
The real deal can't flinch. Can't piss about around the edges. The real deal has to sit down and prepare and say - so, where am I at? how do I feel? in order then to set an intention, be present.
Yesterday evening my cushion arrived. Today everyone else went out. There was no excuse, no escape from the necessity.
I am torn between two lacks of love, crushed between two griefs. The love I can't give and the love I can't have. Grief of giving grief, grief of grieving. Held immobile, roped in the air by two hooks, pulled to the ground by two rocks.
There is pain, and then there is the suffering of the pain. I can't see where one ends and the other begins.
And I've got sinusitis. At least I can swallow a pain-killer for that.
Crap.
The real deal can't flinch. Can't piss about around the edges. The real deal has to sit down and prepare and say - so, where am I at? how do I feel? in order then to set an intention, be present.
Yesterday evening my cushion arrived. Today everyone else went out. There was no excuse, no escape from the necessity.
I am torn between two lacks of love, crushed between two griefs. The love I can't give and the love I can't have. Grief of giving grief, grief of grieving. Held immobile, roped in the air by two hooks, pulled to the ground by two rocks.
There is pain, and then there is the suffering of the pain. I can't see where one ends and the other begins.
And I've got sinusitis. At least I can swallow a pain-killer for that.
posted by tournesol at 11:45 am
5 Comments:
There is pain, and then there is the suffering of the pain. I can't see where one ends and the other begins.
Right now I'm not sure there's much space between the two. The real challenge may be finding some way to believe, or at least to hope, that at some point the two will diverge. And you'll be able to distance yourself from the suffering, if not from the pain itself.
One of my teachers says that it's incumbent upon us to feel gratitude when we pray the morning gratitude prayer. And, he says, if we can't feel gratitude in the moment of the prayer, for whatever reason, then we should pray that we might be able to feel gratitude again someday.
Did you write this, or did I? Maybe you're eavesdropping on my perpetual problem with meditation: getting myself to DO IT.
With that admission of my own fallibility as a caveat...
Whenever I'm feeling like I've too much mental pain to allow me to sit, I try to come back to my body: my actual tangible senses. Do you meditate with a mala (meditation beads)? When I have lots of "head-static," I find it very "grounding" to able to touch something tangible, something "outside" my pain-filled mind. If you don't have fancy meditation beads, a palm-sized stone will do, or you could emulate Buddha right before his enlightenment & touch one hand to the floor.
The mind-hurt doesn't go away when you do this, but I find it powerful to be able to focus on something physical in addition to the psychic pain. "My heart is broken, but I still can feel the rise and fall of my belly as I breath, the stacking of my vertebrae as I sit, the touch of my two thumbs in their mudra." For me, those tangibles bring my thoughts back to here and what is rather than back then and what could have been.
Of course, crying is another great physical practice, but I trust you already know that...
Dear Rachel and Lori...
Thank you so much for being here and your experience and advice. Part of the realisation of alone-ness seems to be the experience of not-alone-ness. I can only talk in platitudes because I don't have the language :-)
And then there's the demonstration that defining defuses. So having sat, and looked at (I was going to say "confronted", but of course that's wrong) but having allowed it to *be*, the *threat* recedes.
I do have a mala. Having, a few months ago, divested myself of all the jewellery I used to have hung about my person in the form of personal talismans ("if I wear this I will be safe", ascribing outside agency in an entirely superstitious fashion) I now have my mala on my wrist. But it's a different deal - this is not imbued with external magic powers, it serves as a visual and physical reminder of the practice.
And tears. Yes. Amazing how, when I sat, they trickled out of each eye, under my chin and met and ran down my throat together. An interesting sensation and a pleasing symbolism. Possibly :-)
And come over to 100 Days and at least read the struggles over people are having with practice. It is a universal problem! One thing I find, being task-oriented, is that meditation is not really about "solving" problems or getting from A to B, let alone "successfully." It is about being with oneself wherever one is - gently. And because I come to it as a Christian of sorts, that also means not judging oneself, and trsuting that in the practice of sitting gently and allowing the thoughts to come and to leave, one will gradually see things one hasn't - a wider view - and one will also become a wider vessel for the light, for God, for grace or whatever we call that stuff that is trying to get in. So although I tend to also think of it as a task of looking hard at myself and stopping avoiding my "stuff" - it is also the flip side of that - a time of allowing oneself to be healed by getting into the "seat of judgement" and finding out that in some quite large sense, there's no judging to be done.
Nice new zafu, BTW. I wish mine were blue!
I find this post and these comments very helpful to read today. Thank you.
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