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Woe To You
By gartenfische | July 24, 2007
if you come upon me and I’ve skipped my morning meditation. So if you see me coming with a frown on my face, eyes drawn in and vacant, flee. On second thought, it’s hard to tell if fish eyes are drawn in and vacant. . . .
Honestly, I hardly ever skip, because I know I will feel horribly out of sorts (in spite of the fact that sometimes I still sit there thinking half the time–this, after almost six years!).
I wonder if the reason some friends don’t try meditation in spite of my hearty endorsement is they’re afraid they might end up like me.* But seriously, the amazing thing about it is you end up more like you. The real you. I don’t want to scare anybody off, but the process whereby you become you means throwing off the stuff you’ve taken on that is not you. The ugliness inside comes up for you to see in all its glory. Stuff you didn’t even know existed (me, angry?). Roberta Bondi wrote something like, How can we be healed of our deep wounds unless we’re aware they’re there? So God gently helps us to become aware of what’s inside, of our dark side. I admit it’s difficult when the ugliness surfaces, but it’s more painful to live under the influence of secret baggage year after year, to be unaware and reactive. So it comes up and gets burned off little by little and then it’s not inside eating away at our happiness. Every bit that is discharged lightens the load. Brings me back to me.
I went to my favorite used bookstore the other day and came away with Breath by Breath: The Liberating Practice of Insight Meditation by Larry Rosenberg. (Okay, yes, I sometimes do buy books without reading them first, especially non-fiction of this type.) I was flipping through and came across this (which, along with the fact that the title contained both breath and meditation, tempted me to buy):
If you’ve sat with the breath for even a few minutes, you’ve seen that this practice is an open invitation for everything inside you to come up. You see your wild mind, which we all have, and which can be quite overwhelming at first [yeah]. . . . . The ultimate goal–though this is no easy thing and takes time to develop–is to allow everything to come up, with all its energy: all of, for instance, your anger and loneliness and despair, to allow these things to arise and be transformed by the light of awareness. There is tremendous energy in these states, and much of the time we suppress them, so that we not only lose all the energy that is in them but also expend a great deal keeping them down.
Here’s to becoming whole and free and ourselves.
To be continued on the morrow. . . .
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*Actually, that wasn’t one friend’s concern; she said, “I don’t like the idea of meditation; why would I want my mind to be a blank?” Well, you wouldn’t, and meditation doesn’t kill your brain–but you’d want it to be under your control, wouldn’t you? Therein lies freedom.
Topics: God, meditation |