The Gate

Boy, I really slacked off posting here. Sorry about that. I started to feel silly, posting the same thing over and over, but I'm not going to worry about feeling silly. I'm going to resume posting every day, even if it's just a sentence or two.

While I've lapsed in posting, I have not lapsed in inquiry. I'm still doing various forms of meditation and inquiry for two hours a day and punctuating the rest of the day with small moments of inquiry, whenever I come up for air from a work meeting or whatever.

Starting a couple of months ago, something shifted. Not THE shift, but a pretty profound change in my lived experience. There's a sense in which, until recently, I have never been happy. I have had plenty of moments of happiness, even hours of it here and there. But there's always been a baseline hum of, at best, "nothing is wrong." At worst, the hum is anxious. Glass half empty, even during happy moments. This negative hum has been the music of my life going back to early childhood.

Much of it has been extreme discomfort with my body, in my body, being a body ... I grew up in an intellectual family and was praised for identifying as a from-the-neck-up being. And then I had various experiences as a kid that made me uncomfortable with anything below the neck. Until recently, meditation has been mostly unpleasant. I have always envied the folks who say it's relaxing or blissful. What happens to me (or did until recently) is that, when I sit still and quiet my mind, all the body feelings I work so hard to suppress comes rearing up, and I struggle to keep meditating. I get itchy and antsy. At times, the discomfort has brought me close to panic.

A couple of years ago, I both understood the problem for the first time and started throwing lots of stuff at it: felt-sense work--meditating on my body--working with a therapist, exercising, using psychedelics, and, of course, working with you. I feel like I'm a slow-moving barge that has finally hooked itself up to enough tugboats to get around a difficult corner. My intuition is that many of the blocks I have to awakening are body based.

A couple of months ago, the combination of all this stuff started having an effect. One day I thought "I feel good! I feel good in a way that I haven't felt before. The negative background hum has been replaced by a positive one. Amazingly, it feels good to be a body!"

I told you about that trippy, tingly feeling I was getting. That was part of it. Sometimes it feels like I'm slipping into a warm bath over and over--that first moment of pleasure when you feel the warmth come over you. What I've realized is that there have always been good feelings along with the bad ones, but I didn't know how to notice them. It's like I've tuned to a new body frequency. I intellectually know that, really, there are no good and bad feelings. There are just sensations and thought labels of them. I'm not quite there yet.

It feels like, for the first time in my life (I turn 60 this year), I have been able to exhale. Meditation is no longer a chore. There are limits to how long I'm comfortable sitting, but I can go way longer than I used to and enjoy it. A skeptical part of me keeps waiting for the good feelings to end, but they've endured for a couple of months mow.

Until last week. I had a health crisis. I thought I was having a stroke. I lost my ability to move and talk and was rushed to the hospital. Turns out, it was an extreme allergic reaction. Food poisoning. After it was out of my system, I was fine. I'm fine now. But there were about five times during a long night when I was sure I was dying. When I was discharged, a kind of funk came over me. It felt like the experience undid all of the positive feelings and changed my background hum back to its glass-half-empty setting. It has taken me about four days to come out of that funk, but now the good feelings are returning.

The are not (yet?) back to where they were. I feel what perhaps is a healthy mix of pleasure and displeasure. But the warm-bath feeling is back, if not quite as strong and continual as it was before.

How all this relates to what we're working on here, I'm not entirely sure, but I believe it does. Very much.

I'm continuing to work on (I don't know if "work on" is the right phrase) feeling into how body sensations aren't located anywhere. It's very tricky for me, but it's hit home how I live with this layer of "body image" thought. I focus attention on my hands and ask "What's there that isn't a thought?" I certainly can feel the non-thought sensation, but there thought "my hands" is there at the same time. And not just at the same time. If feels as if that thought is glued to the sensation--like the thought-sensation is a single thing. I don't believe it is, but man is that a hard illusion to shake.

It's like listening to the sound of an orchestra and trying to hear the instruments as separate things.

Awareness is trying to understand what it is.

If feels as if that thought is glued to the sensation--like the thought-sensation is a single thing. I don't believe it is, but man is that a hard illusion to shake.

It's ok. It's not critical to "hear the instruments as separate things".

Until last week. I had a health crisis. I thought I was having a stroke. I lost my ability to move and talk and was rushed to the hospital. Turns out, it was an extreme allergic reaction. Food poisoning. After it was out of my system, I was fine. I'm fine now. But there were about five times during a long night when I was sure I was dying. When I was discharged, a kind of funk came over me. It felt like the experience undid all of the positive feelings and changed my background hum back to its glass-half-empty setting. It has taken me about four days to come out of that funk, but now the good feelings are returning.

How did you feel when you were sure you were dying?

Awareness is trying to understand what it is.

Is awareness trying to understand what it is or is there a thought that says "awareness is trying to understand what it is"?

How did you feel when you were sure you were dying?

I don't remember being scared. It felt like I was being strapped into a roller-coaster. "Okay, here we GO!" I could feel all my senses going.

Is awareness trying to understand what it is or is there a thought that says "awareness is trying to understand what it is"?

There's something that's not a thought. "Awareness is trying to understand what it is" is a crude way of describing it, using words. It's like something is trying to work something out. "What am I?" Something like that. There's some sort of turmoil maybe related to identity in some way.

I don't remember being scared. It felt like I was being strapped into a roller-coaster. "Okay, here we GO!" I could feel all my senses going.

Cool man

It's like something is trying to work something out. "What am I?" Something like that. There's some sort of turmoil maybe related to identity in some way.

Is there something trying to work something out? What is that something? Or is there just trying? Do you find anything that is trying?