Stealth Re-Versioning

Yesterday, a reader's comment brought me back to this blog, after a hiatus of two years. Has much happened in the interim? Yes and no. I'm still struggling, after a fire destroyed my office in 2008, with what I want to do when I grow up. It took a deliriously deep turn this past December, when I blissfully started a class on visioning and strategic planning for my art business and found myself wondering: what DO I want? Since then, it's been a struggle, emotionally, as I find I've spent a lot of my life laying big plans, aiming for big goals, yet not really doing what fed my self-soul.

So this morning, after meditating, I thought it's time to come back and continue here. After all, I've discovered, re-versioning happens even when you don't have big goals and dreams driving you down the road. Maybe especially then.

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In meditating this morning, using a meditation for unpleasant or difficult emotions, I realized that I can often hold two different emotions in my body at once: both the loving-kindness peace, and whatever negative emotion – in this morning’s case, anxiety – separately. They manifest in different parts of my body. The loving kindness, when I can maintain it as the focus of my attention, helps calm the anxiety a bit, or at least lets me feel anxious without anxiety taking off and taking over. And I thought: if I’m not completely the anxiety, and I’m not completely the loving kindness, what am I? And I clearly experienced that I was not these bundles of emotions and thoughts, but something else.

That “other,” that self, is a mystery. It’s not my body, my thoughts, my emotions, my actions; and yet it is. I remember a question/koan I learned a long time ago: Who is it that watches my thoughts and emotions when I sit and meditate? Who is it having the thoughts and emotions?

In the Buddhist tradition, that one watching is the Whole, the One; the part of us that is connected to the whole. In fact, there is no “part of us,” there is no separation from the whole. We create and imagine that separation because we cannot, in out little minds, do otherwise and (in the way-back days) survive the beasts out to eat us. We had to differentiate: flower from food, pack animal from lion, self from other. Yet it is a type of fiction, an amazing and incomprehensible fiction, because it seems so real.

I’m reminded of when my depression kicks in and I am struggling with it: it always seems so real, and yet I have learned to not make big decisions during the episodes until I figure out what’s going on, because the next day – the next moment – it all vanishes like a ripple in a stream.

Which means the feelings of loving-kindness are also a fabrication, an attachment, the Buddhist teacher would say. What is eternal is what is beyond that attachment and all of the others. What is eternal is the mystery.

My affirmation for today: I am a person who expresses the wonder and joy of life – at the mystery – in as many moments as possible. I hope many others may do the same.

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I realize that, in light of what the people of Japan are experiencing now, that this meditation seems elitist and ephemeral compared to very grim realities. Yet I hope the same peace and joy for every person there, in the midst of earthquake/tsunami/radiation realities. As a teacher once said, pain is real, and inevitable; suffering is optional. May the people in and of Japan suffer as little as is humanly possible.