Month: May 2019

Sometimes, I think that my heart is my body. My feeling of awareness seems deeply grounded in my body experience. My body is the root of my perceptions, and my heart experience is anchored in that body awareness. Even when I am reflective and am aware that my body is aware, even in those times of focused concentration, my body tugs at that awareness.

As much as I know that my awareness is more than physical, so much of my reflective awareness is still shaped by a penetrating sense of my body. Even when I have those fleeting moments of touching something that seems completely empty, without time or space, my awareness habitually returns to my body and all that it feels.

I may think of myself as essentially a spiritual being. I also seem to be routinely learning what it means to make the most of what it means to be alive with a well-0functioning body, a body that at least still supports my consciousness. I am aware that until I am totally free of what it means to have a self-defined body, I will experience the tension between the physicality of experience and the aspect of experience that is almost totally separate.

The price of being alive is living. Each moment is full of the tension of a wager. Unless I am willing to take the risk of being fully alive in that moment, unless I am willing to embrace the risk of surrender to what is soon to become, I will not experience what it means to be alive with a heart that is my body.

Each moment has the risk of unpredictability and uncertainty. That is what it means for me to have a heart that is my body. My experience is embedded in an uncertain, unpredictable world. That produces a tension.

The fragile experience of an open heart in the body of mine is dependent on my risky leap into each new moment. There is a constant tension between what I think I know in the present moment and what is yet to be.

In order to be alive, I must willingly give myself to it. Not hesitate, not resist. The tension draws me into a different kind of experience that leans beyond my body.

I watched a spider clamor up the top of the shade and then up the wall of my bedroom. There was an instant when I relaxed inside and saw the spider so differently. The whole aspect of my experience shifted. The distance between me and the spider seemed to disappear and we were suddenly next to one another. Someone else might observe that we were actually some twelve feet apart, an observation so different from my experience.

It is such a pleasure to surrender to what presents itself, and I have the joy of experiencing this from time to time. It occurs when I surrender into a place of deep relaxation. One might say it is a deep opening to concentration. It is an effort of no effort. My mind takes a break.

It could perhaps be the touch of the firm mattress where I am sitting. It could be a plant rising from the ground in my garden to be seen and touched. There is a strange emptiness that arises when I experience some thing or some one with surrender. A vastness appears, and there is no attempt by my rational mind to put things into a familiar shape or form. The object of my attention and I seem to step into a field of emptiness.

What had appeared to have shape and form and distance becomes so close the we share the same space. Nothing has apparently changed, the person or the plant or I. But I seem to have shifted in how I am experiencing something. It happens by a simple transforming act of surrender.

Suddenly everything is different. My skin has disappeared and I am moving through space that no longer seems to exist. Simply because I have no longer given it shape or dimension, I have surrendered to whatever or whoever is before me. We have lost distinction and reference.

It is an encounter of deep pleasure, this simple act of surrender.

There is something about expectations that I find unsettling. I am very aware that expectations can often be the occasion of disappointment, especially if the expected doesn’t measure up to what was in my mind.

Not meeting expectations can take the joy out of an otherwise pleasant experience. Relatively neutral experiences can turn sour. Not realizing expectations between individuals can foster irritation and arguments.

I also have this notion that anticipating joyful experience can be a very positive force in my life. I want things to turn out pleasantly. I might even want them to be exciting. Perhaps, for me, the key is how much I am grasping and attached to what I “want”.

The future is constantly full of surprises for me, and things seldom turn out just as I expected. The future often doesn’t measure up to what I expected or perhaps even wanted. The more I am attached to how I want the future to be, the more likely I am going to be disappointed if my experience doesn’t match my expectations.

I don’t want to give up having expectations. At least not yet. I think I do intend to be much more accepting what happens, even if the present doesn’t turn out the way I expected. Resisting how things turn out is a great source of discomfort and is very unsettling. Being attached to my expectations can be a serious distraction and disturbance, a resistance to what I am experiencing.

I still want to keep expectations. I am trying not to be too cozy with them.

The distinction between what I think and what I feel is not what it once seemed to be. What a surprise it has been to discover that to feel is so much more than to know. Perhaps it is a deeper way of knowing, without all the cognitive frills and references that now seem to have cluttered up my life. Things have gotten much simpler. And a lot more clear.

Doing it “right” is, for me, not so much about knowing as it is about feeling. My mind may still clamor to know, inform and instruct. But union, intimacy and absorption is about my ability to feel, not know.

I now think that mindfulness has little to do with mind, except perhaps to set an intention to be aware, to be full of this or that. Perhaps the word should be “feel-fulness” because the experience of union and absorption is not one of the mind but what seems to me to be more of the heart.

My mind must relax, let go of its appointments and duties for me to truly feel. My mind may gather and present data, information and perceptions. But it is the heart that truly knows. There is nothing rational about feeling except for the signposts the might lead to what I feel.

For me to feel is not a reaction, not emotion. To feel is a letting go, a reaching out, an awareness at the deepest level. Emotions may arise, but they are a response to the heart feeling, the awareness. What I feel is not an emotion, but it is an open door to what is present, an opening to an experience of awareness. To feel is not to react but to be intimately aware.

For me, to feel is to enter into presence with a rock, a plant, a person. It is neither good or bad, neither positive or negative. To feel is to be present with a deep sense of awareness.

To feel is to experience overwhelming joy. The mind is finally completely at rest, at ease, without agitation. The mind even seems totally disengaged. To feel is to arise at formless insight, unshaped awareness. It is to know without any reference to past experience. When I feel, my storehouse of experiences is of little use, except perhaps to guide me until that shapeless moment of awareness.

To feel, I must forget. All that has transpired before now has lost its relevance, and I know as for the first time.

Memory, for me, may even cloud or distract my ability to feel. When I reference myself or what has gone before, my clarity of feeling diminishes. The memory of myself or my experience is a great distraction. Self-referencing keeps me from the deep feeling. I am most aware when I ignore that it is “I” who is feeling. The more I am aware it is I who feels, the less likely the feeling will be deep or intimately engaging.

This has been a wonderful shift in awareness. For me, letting go of my rational supports has lifted the fog and revealed a new and exciting landscape. All I have to do is feel, and feel alone.

I do not want my remaining life to be a string of disappointments. It has been easy for me to get disappointed when things do not turn out as I wanted or even expected. I am learning to accept the turn of events as they evolve and not judge them harshly when they fail to measure up to what I wanted.

A cold winter day this past season may have been an occasion for discomfort or even difficulty. But I wanted to recognize it just as it was: an uncomfortable and difficult day. It did me no good to be disappointed that it was not warmer or more sunny when it was in fact cold and dreary. It did me no good to be disappointed that it was not the kind of winter day I might have wanted or liked.

For me, it might have been suitable for me to complain that a day is cold and dreary. But why would I be disappointed just because it is not what it clearly is not? Why be disappointed because it is not sunny and warm?

It might be that I am now sad that a beloved plant is not coming back this spring. But I am not disappointed that it appears to be dead. I am actually a little surprised when my plants return, just as they have in the past, but I am not expecting that things will be a certain way. I am not likely to be disappointed.

For me, it is the difference that comes when I am not so attached to something I want to happen. The more I grasp and cling to a future, expected event, the more likely I am to be disappointed. I try not to live in the future. I try not to focus on how things will be or how I want them to be. Then I am not disappointed when things don’t turn out just as I wanted or anticipated.

There is an unpredictable aspect of all future outcomes, and that especially includes human behavior. For me, humans seem eminently unpredictable. I try not to set too many expectations about how people will act or react. Instead, I try to focus on how they are acting right not, without much interpretation of what the future implications are. The more I try to predict how humans will act, or anticipate how I want them to act, the more likely I am to be disappointed.

I can get caught up in the importance of a plant’s return to my garden, or how I want someone to behave. I may be no less annoyed or saddened when things do not turn out as I would prefer. But I am not necessarily disappointed.

The feeling quality of the experience is remarkably different. The key factor for me has to do with how much I grasp or cling for future events to be a certain way.

I may be sad if it rains on a day I planed work in the garden, but I need not be disappointed unless I am so attached to a bright sunny day. I may not be happy it is raining, but I am not attached to the sunny day that never happened. For me, it is a more flexible way to live, and is an easier way for me to enjoy gardening or being with people.

No one else can manage my disappointment but me. It is mine alone to control. The more I am attached to an unrealized future, the more I am likely to be disappointed. The more I marvel and am even surprised by current happenings, the less likely I am to be disappointed . I may even be able to enjoy a rainy day that interferes with my abandoned plans for gardening.

When I am disappointed, I think that I am resisting what is. I am staying attached to a notion of how I think things should be or how I want them to be. When I am disappointed, I am not angry at how things are as much as I am angry that things are different from what I want.

Disappointment for me is a frustrated realization that this is not the way I want something to be. It is a frustration that things are as they are and they do not measure up to the unreality to which I remain attached.

It is satisfying for me to recognize that, even when I don’t like how things might turn out, I don’t have to be disappointed as well.