Month: September 2018

I have just been reminded that being connected actually requires no effort.    In fact, becoming connected is disrupted by effort.   For something that is so effortless our culture seems to be determined to keep me from being connected.

I live in a culture that is at war with itself on this issue.    On one hand, the culture is full of distractions that seem intent on keeping me disconnected.    How can I pay attention, how can I be aware of anything or anyone when the day is full of distractions:  activities considered entertainment, imagined problems to be resolved by buying something,  forms of promised happiness dangled before me to lure me from what is real.

At the same time, notions of being permanently connected in a stable future are constantly promoted.  Ownership perpetuates a grasping of things that are supposedly mine.   Relationships are promised with structures as contrived as marriage and nations.    The very concepts that promise permanent relationships, lasting connectedness, have the seeds that promote disconnection, separateness and dissatisfaction.

I began to learn to be connected first when I practiced Tai Chi Chih.    I gradually became more aware of my body and the energy flowing in it.   I first relaxed and became intimate with my moving hands, arms and legs.   The connection gradually sped throughout my whole body.  I had to make no effort.    I only had to yield to the moving parts, to relax into the feeling of movement.    I learned to stop trying to feel and simply paid attention.

This experience of being connected stayed with me as I began a regular practice of meditation about three years ago.   I yielded to a space and allowed myself to relax into it.   I was encouraged by the new kind of joy I found.

I learned to connect to a strange void even while I was aware of the deep calm that filled my body.   It has been very surprising in its simplicity.

My days are gradually being enlivened by similar aware moments of intimacy, of awareness of connection.  Sometimes the intimacy is with a plant, sometimes with the ground or breeze.   The connectedness is easiest for me to experience when I am aware of living things.    I often bypass their color or fragrance and connect more with an awareness of their essence.    They are simply present.

The hardest connections for me are with people.  It is hard even though I have developed an open-heart that seems an open door for anyone to enter.   This openness occurs routinely, often for people on the bus who are scarcely aware that I am present.

For people with whom I interact, it gets more complicated.    Humans seem to require more trusting interactions for mutual connection or intimacy to occur.   Unlike plants, there is no presumption of connection.    On the contrary, we have been taught well to beware and suspect connection or intimacy.    There is such resistance and caution.

The reteat I was on recently taught me otherwise.   It was a time of greater mutual trust, connection and felt intimacy.   I experienced a deep connection with the woods and with many people.   It was a lovely time to feel unspoken, undefined, unclinging intimacy.

Being connected and clinging are not compatible.   Felt connection is possible only by removing hinderances caused by clinging.    Connection is more about yielding to impermanence.   True intimacy is not achieved by clinging but instead naturally flows from yielding.

Awareness and insight lead to felt connection and intimacy.   They affect the ways I am choosing to experience my connection with rocks, plants and people.   I welcome the feeling of great freedom and intimacy.

 

 

What am I doing wrong?   I feel like I am on the other side of a mirror, a looking-glass.    When I invite others to join me, there is such a reluctance to step across.

I am aware that I am the one inviting, and perhaps that is the problem.    I am aware more and more that I live in a world that is both historical and absolute.    Largely through meditation, I am becoming familiar with a world that has such a wonderful aspect.    It is becoming more and more apparent and obvious to me.

My experience of open-heartedness continues to grow.    It is an aspect of me that I have learned only by dwelling on the absolute side of the mirror.    This open-heartedness is an open invitation for others to join me.    But invitation is not enough.    I seem so inept in explaining to others how this aspect of the world can be so transformative and wonderful.

It is hard to give the invitation without it seeming a reflection of the typical, historical world.    Anything I say is heard with historical ears, and it is hard to open those ears to the absolute side of the world.     With friends and acquaintances it seems so hard to explain the depth of connection offered by stepping through the mirror into the absolute.

Sometimes I wonder if this is an aspect of the world that belongs only to me.    I have entered it through my own way, and it may not be a passage others can follow.   I wonder if I must be in this place by myself, while I also dwell in the historical world and live by its norms.    I definitely want others to join me, but most seem unwilling.

It can be a strange and unfamiliar place.    But it seems so clear to me the deeper into it I go.    While I show the way, even the curious seem to falter and draw back.

It is getting more clear now, but I have been vaguely aware for a long time that I live in both the historical and absolute world.    There have only been a few times that others have chosen to join me, and this is disappointing.    I have been able to get only a few people to join me on the other side of the mirror.     Maybe that is why I have kept one foot so firmly in the historical world.

As I look around, I see most people living in an imaginary world with little ability to move beyond the constructs created by society.    It is wonderful that in my sangha, there are those who can feel their way beyond the conventions of normal living.   I am grateful to have them as companions, as searchers in this absolute place that is sometimes brilliant and sometimes foggy.

I am aware that the rules are different on my absolute side of the mirror.    Actually, there are no rules in the absolute world.    The constraints are on the historical side of the mirror, and I have very adroitly lived by those rules most of my life.    Decisions I have made, invitations I have turned down were made based on rules and not based on being anchored in the absolute.

On the absolute side of the mirror, everything is simply apparent and known.    The historical world relies on rules to give guidance, perhaps to quiet minds so that people might know, for a moment, what it feels like to be anchored in an absolute world.    Things seem so much more apparent and known on my absolute side of the mirror.

I wish I was better at offering invitations to others to join me.

As I was concluding my meditation time this morning, a word flashed into my mind.    I thought for a brief moment what this felt like to be sitting on a cushion,  legs crossed, eyes closed, hands in my lap.   The word “orgasmic” instantly leaped into my mind.

This is not a typical way to describe meditation.

However, for me, the condition of meditation is so close to an orgasmic rush of excitement, of total letting go, of being suspended in time in space.   There is an intense loss of self and openness to other that is becoming a familiar part of my time spent in meditation.

My whole body seems to be in a continuous state of gleeful vibrancy.    The rush of warmness, generated from within, fills my legs, head, torso, arms, and hands.     My head feels like it has opened up and is blooming like the open petals of a flower.   My whole body is open to the experience.

This is nothing I make happen.   I have simply relaxed, and my whole body seems to find its natural state.    As soon as I quiet my mind, it all happens, like a rushing cascade.   As long as I am not distracted by sounds, aches, random thoughts, it all just rushes in.    It can take place in a matter of seconds.

I’m a little surprised that I have never seen the word “orgasmic” used to explain what happens in meditation.   For me, it is the most descriptive adjective I know to explain the experience.    It describes the physical glee that opens my body and mind to awareness and is very much like the experience of orgasm.

My own hesitation to write about this is probably no different from what others feel when they approach the issue.    Any reference to sexual delight is simply not considered socially appropriate.

It is a shame that words have such a control over us that we would shrink from using them when they could most aptly describe what is happening.

I am aware that members of my Sangha speak very little about their meditation experience.    Is this because the experience is too private and therefore revealing?   Is it simply an experience that could perhaps aptly be described in sexual terms like “orgasmic?”   References to sexual issues is generally taboo in conversation.

I now that, for me, meditation is a sustained “orgasmic” experience as long as I can maintain my focus without distraction.    It is an experience that I take with me through the day and recall frequently but with less intensity at times of mindfulness.

I would not use the word “orgasmic” to describe these random mindful moments I have throughout the day.    But the residue of gleeful absorption still infuses whatever I am doing at the time.   Perhaps “mini orgasmic” moments is an apt description of my experiences of mindfulness.

I could call these moments “joyful” and be correct.    But “joyful” seems so abstract when gleeful “orgasmic” is so much a better word to describe what I experience.

 

Since my retreat experience this summer, I have been exploring my newly discovered and deep power to feel.   It often feels like I have learned to unleash an energy of feeling that I never before knew was there.   I have heard myself describing it as ‘going deeper,’ as I attempt to explain what this new depth of feeling is like.

What I wasn’t expecting is that I had also uncovered a deep feeling of emptiness and longing.    It is as if there is a void that wants to be filled.   I am sometimes not even sure if it is a feeling of joy or absolute emptiness.   It is a strange combination of feeling the exhilaration and terror of a free fall into a bottomless chasm.

I feel like I have come home, but it is often more like stepping into a familiar void than into a place of welcoming fulness.    This is a place of scary emptiness and longing even while it is a place of intense excitement and glee.

The act of letting go in mindfulness is for me an act of courage.   It reminds me of what it felt like the first time I stepped off the ledge on a zip-line and I went plunging out of control into thin air.     I still don’t understand what it means that as I am in free-fall into an empty void I am also feeling an intense sense of longing.   The void wants to be filled, but I don’t know what the longing is about or what I am longing for.

I am sure that I never knew what I was in for when I opened this new treasure chest of deeper feeling.    The treasure chest is not full of golden nuggets or diamonds.    It is an absence of all that I have known.    It is a beckoning  chasm without dimension .

This is a place of no space, no time, no contact, no grounding.

It is no small wonder that I have been inviting others to be there with me.   It is not just that I think it would be a  good experience for them to become more mindful.    I am also terrified of being in that scary void alone.

I can only speculate about what is happening.   It seems to me that becoming more open-hearted means creating a relaxed void that draws in all manner of reality.    Awareness creates something like a magnetic form of absorption.    The longing is the tension of the void wanting to be filled.

I am confident that others have been here before me, and I hope to learn from them.   Right now, it is simply a mystery to be felt and observed.   .

 

When I invite friends into my garden, I learn about them and I learn about me.    I learn how I react to their presence, even while I become more aware of their presence.    If I am not aware of their presence and mine, I lose out on both fronts:   my awareness of them and my awareness of me.

If I am unaware of my reaction to their presence, I don’t truly understand what is real.    I am out of touch.    Even if I touch them without being aware of them and myself, I hardly understand what is going on.    Reality is in the interaction.

As I become aware of my friends and how I am connecting with them, I am aware of the only true reality.    That is the reality of our coming together.    I miss out if I am only aware of then, without being aware of myself.    I also miss out if I am only focused on myself and how I am reacting.

There can be times that my grasping is so strong that it dominates my awareness and how I relate to a friend.    Grasping is not wrong.    I simply suffer by losing out.    There is no true awareness of how we come together, how we relate.

I spent time with a friend yesterday and it was a time of simple joy of being together.    We shared stories of how we are living our lives.    I was so aware of her presence and of my own presence as we walked, listened, talked.

We are both a balm and a delight for one another.    We are in a common spot together because we are not wanting to be someplace else.    We are aware of ourselves, one another and our mutual autonomy.     I am aware of the shared pleasure we experience in the time we spend together.    It is an awareness that I carry with me when we are not side by side.

The friends that are most able to enjoy my garden are those who are free from grasping and from being grasped.    For us it is a simple shared awareness of one another and our common presence.   We are acutely aware not only of one another but of our individual selves as well.

We are most in touch when we know both one another and our individual selves.    That is how I recognize and relate to my deepest friends.

I heard it a long time ago, but I have only now begun to really think it is true.    It was a rather simple concept, perhaps too glib to invite much of my inspection or acceptance.    I once heard that when you love someone, you are really loving an image of yourself that you can see in them.    I never realized how profound a statement that could be.    I’ve been peeling back the layers.

I’ve had many experiences in recent years that have been gently nudging me into this notion of a mirror.   However, it was a recent jolt into awareness that opened my mind on mirroring.   I met someone at a time I was experiencing a much deeper kind of open-heartedness.    This was someone whose life is far away, separated from me by an international boundary.    But the kinship I felt was so intense that the notion of separateness was insignificant.

As I slowly let go of what I realized was a nearly impossible situation, I was amazed by what I discovered in myself.    First, it was an intense lesson in what grasping feels like.    Second, it opened my eyes about mirroring as I asked myself repeatedly, “Why her?”

I think my answer is a bit ego-centric because I realized that I had felt an instant kinship because I saw and presumed a deep kinship.    We seemed cut from similar cloth.    I saw a kind of reflection of the kind of person I imagine myself to be, or want to be.   I felt a deep open-hearted engagement with what I thought I saw.

I saw mirrored in her the humanity that we have in common, and it seemed to be quite extensive in how similar and familiar it felt.    I was the Golden-haired Boy who was both curious about and fell in love with his reflection in Iron John’s pond.    For a brief time I recognized the common grounding we share in the absolute.    It was so easy to grasp because I thought I saw a reflection of the universal world I am familiar with.

That encounter taught me much about mirroring and gave me much to think about.     I think I sometimes experience the same kind of mirroring in people not obviously like me, and those are the ones who reflect the hidden part of me, the part of me yet to emerge.    I can also fall in love then, but perhaps not so easily.    It is a little more of a challenge.

More significantly, I recognize that this same thing happens with rocks, plants and people I may only casually meet.     My heart is open and ready, and they move right in because I recognize the common aspects we share.   I see that a rock and I are somewhat the same.    I am part of plants and they are part of me.    The affinity is natural.    I have a shared experience of humanity with everyone I meet.    All are a reflection of what I experience in myself.     What I experience in them opens my awareness of what I am able to see in myself.

I also know that I need not grasp what I see.   It already exists in me.

Perhaps the image of a mirror is not apt because, after all, a mirror only reflects what is real.    The image is not typically seen as real, only the reflected object.

But what if it were the other way around and the only reality is the image.    Perhaps seeing the image is the only real experience.    The only reality is actually the interaction between the observer and the observed.   All else is populated by imagination.

The stars appear to shine in the night sky.   Perhaps they are a chance to see what we already experience here in our historical world of earth.

I actually like thinking about mirroring this way because it deals with my uneasy feeling about being ego-centric.    It actually doesn’t feel very ego-centric when I recognize in other people, plants and rocks what I know from my deep experiences of myself.    For me it all blends together and the reality emerges somewhere in the middle.

Neither am I  troubled by the experience of loving what I see reflected in rocks, plants and people.    All of us, after all, are all part of the same singular entity.

To some, I may have the appearance of a normal, very typical human being who has been around for quite a few years.    But I am aware that I am living an absolute life in an historical world.    I know and feel it.   I have begun to be in touch with the absolute, formless aspect of myself, even while I function daily as someone with real flesh and blood.

I am discovering that it is not enough to have intellectual knowledge or awareness of this absolute aspect of reality.    I have had to get a feeling for what it is like.  I am aware that I  have only a tiny experience of this alien aspect of myself.    And it grows day by day.

Some days I even feel like an alien in a foreign land.

I have entered a phase of life dominated by being in joy.    I am stepping into a time of life characterized by in-joyment.   I am beginning to live in an in-joyed life.   It begins in the morning, and infuses the rest of the day.

As I sit here on the side of my bed, listening to the softly falling rain, I feel the pleasantness of living in joy.    I know this will follow me throughout the day.

I have experienced other phases of living.    I lived the life of a monk for over a decade.    Then there was the phase of living as the companion and helper of an artist, a bit of an experience in abstraction .    I then helped raise two boys to adulthood, a time of work and being in struggle much of the time.

My time of tasks has passed now, and I am beginning to live in joy.    I  am free, but recognize that I am rooted in a world I hardly knew existed for me before.

I wake each morning, grateful that I have another day to in-joy living.    Even the tasks before me attract me with the enticement to in-joy them.    Listening to the rain falling on the trees outside my window is but the beginning of an in-joyed day.

I am learning that simply accepting what exists, what presents to me, is a throbbing source of joy.    Seeing and knowing the prickly seed arrays of aging coneflowers transports me into joy.    Being aware of the touch of a companion is a loving moment of in-joyment.

Today, I am aware of promised visits with two friends later today and the thought alone of their presence is a source of joy.    The actual experience, I know, will offer so much more in-joyment.  This is the beginning of a day of joy.

I will soon sit on my cushion for a while, and the feeling of in-joyment will wash through my body.    My mind will again open to an awareness of sitting in undefined space.    Whatever enters my mind will be infused with the warm glow of awareness and offer an insight I have only begun to in-joy. Those few moments of alert awareness will follow me as I step through the day, reminding me again and again that I am living in an in-joyed time of my life.

On a typical day, people may ask me many times how I am.    The joy of the day is often so present so much a part of me, that past days of in-joyment are a faint memory by comparison.    So while I can only reply, “It’s a good day,” I am fully aware that I cannot think of a day that has been more in-joyed than this one.    Even when I am tired and hungry late in an overly-active day, the glow of an in-joyed day is with me.

I often think these days of how Rilke wrote: “I live my life in widening circles that reach across the world.   I may not complete this last one, but I give myself to it.”    I have entered an in-joyable circle  of life and it may well be my last one.    Then again, there may be another phase yet to come.    For now it is good to be in the swell of in-joyed time.

I’ve had a couple of experiences recently that have caused me to think about what I offer to my friends and companions.    What is the offering that I bring to any relationship?    As I sit near someone on the bus, or next to someone in class, or by the pool in my garden, what is it that I am offering?   What do I see myself giving?

Above all, I can  show them a reflection of the beautiful person they are.  They can know themselves as an amazing human being because I can tell them that in many subtle ways.

The interaction is primarily about them and not about me.   I tell them what I see, what they embody.    When this is affirmed by me, they can recognize the wonder in themselves.    They can accept and embrace the awesome beauty of who they are.

I especially am able to reassure them of their awesome beauty in times of doubt and uncertainty.   I know that I rely on my friends and companions for this affirmation.   I also know that I have the growing ability to look inside and directly experience the awesomeness in me.   It is so nice for me to receive this gift from others.    I now also give it to others, just as I can give it to myself in moments of quiet and stillness.

I offer a loving place of refuge and comfort to my companions.    I listen to them, I hug them, I invite them to share their deep aspects.    I embrace all manner of their joys, grief and fears as I accept them with my own focused awareness.   I offer a place and opportunity to be their full, unprotected self. I offer freedom.    They are released to be full, free and independent human beings.

I give them my own ardent presence and awareness with few expectations.    I don’t make any promises or demands for the future, but I do offer my own full and fearless presence right now.    I not only am attentive to them, but I can also be very aware of myself and my on-going experience with them right now.    Because of that, I can be present, sit and stand with them.

I can be a fully adult me with them.    As I have learned to unfold more and more, become more in love with myself, I have much more to offer.   I can present a person who is aware of himself and of the world around him.

I am learning how to know myself and how to allow that knowledge to grow fearlessly.   I can invite others into that place of awareness.    They only have to decide to relax and experience it.    This is an offering I make to all my companions.

 

 

Telling people my age can be tricky business.     I may have traveled around the sun a certain number of times, and that is precisely defined by the calendar.    But I think my own true age is something quite different.

For over a year, I have stopped checking the “white” box on forms that want to know my race.    I think it is time to stop checking the “over 60” box as well.

I am aware that my calendar age speaks one message, but my whole notion of self is on a different track.    My mind just doesn’t conform to my number of trips around the sun.    My body shows some of the traits of my age related to sun trips.    That includes grey hair, thin skin and stiff legs when I get up.   But I don’t think all my body has aged at the same rate as the calendar story says it should have.

I admit that I get a little internal glow when people tell me that I don’t look my age, or they fein surprise when I tell them my age.

I try to throw out all the myths about age and rely on my own reality.   I typically choose a path of my own.   I hardly ever use “age” as an  excuse, except that I now avoid wanton climbing of ladders.    Mostly, I will not be a vassal of the tyranny  of the Julian calendar.

I think calendar age is simply a comparison with what we know about most people who have made a measured number of trips around the sun.    It actually tells me nothing about all the traits typically associated with age.    It only says that such and such is typical of someone my age in calendar years.

Because of my lifestyle, I have traits unlike someone who has made a similar number of trips around the sun.    There are even times that I say that I have lived multiple lives in the calendar space of one lifetime.    Maybe I have actually aged far beyond my calendar years.     I feel rich, abundant and joyful.    None of that can be understood by knowing my number of trips around the sun.

I experience a kind of insight that I seldom see in someone else who has made as many trips around the sun as I.    I think most of my generation is severely lacking in insight.    A friend has pointed out that the insight I experience may come from having been alive in other ways or other times.    She suggests that I may have been here before because some experiences seem so familiar to me and are not typically learned just by making trips around the sun.

My body is more agile and stronger than it was several years ago.    That hardly means that I have made reverse trips around the sun.   Just knowing my trips around the sun has little relationship to my agility or strength.

Knowing my trips around the sun reveals little accuracy about how I think.    As a friend told me, I sometimes think more like a millennial than a baby-boomer.    My mental agility is so much more flexible and unbounded than most of my wearisome contemporaries.   The trips around the sun have had very different effects on us.

My trips around the sun have been accompanied by great freedom from so many social, cultural constraints that typically seem to bind so many of my contemporaries into compliance.

My open-hearted approach to plants, rocks and people is more typical of  the discovery experience of one who has made either far fewer or many more trips around the sun.    Where I see others my age closing in, I see myself as opening up.

I now recognize that when I tell others that I am “old” it is to mock the presumption of age.    I do not see myself as fitting into the mold of someone my age in trips around the sun.   What does telling my age describe except to define what category of humans I belong in.  I clearly don’t see myself belonging to any of them.

So from now on, I will not check the box that says “over 60”.    I may simply choose another age that better matches my attitude that day.