floating in a vast sea

tuesday nights now i’m hosting a meditation group. only a small group could come to meditation this time, but it was the most mind blowing session i’ve experienced yet. we sat in silence for 25 minutes, then had a short break, then sat again for 45 minutes.

a newcomer requested a guided breath meditation for the first session, so i chose to primarily watch my breath instead of a more open shamatha technique i typically practice. a challenge i’ve always had in breath meditation is avoiding having some impact on the breath. when i watch it, i invariably change it. it was until now almost impossible to just let the breath happen naturally, as long as i was aware of it.

until last night. and that caused something more profound.

i think what made the difference was two fold. during the first session, i started by guiding the awareness of the environment and pointing out the sounds and to just experience them. this was a way to start in the present moment, and practice having an openness before turning attention to the breath. sounds just arise and when sitting quietly we have no part in why they are there. the sounds occur and then pass on their own. we don’t need to have an attitude toward them. we can just be open to them. then after sitting and listening for awhile, we turned to watching the breath rise and fall with that same attitude that there isn’t anything one needs to do with breath - it just happens on it’s own and we can be open and unimposing to it.

still i found it hard to not cause some change or subtle control onto my breathing.

then in the second session, i started with a guided session on body sensations and asked the group to at first pay attention only to the top of the head. then expand that to include the temples and forehead. then the back of the head. then the ears. i paused at the jaw for awhile. that typically has some interesting tension and feelings for me in it when i put attention there. as does the mouth. we moved to the shoulders and i paused for awhile there. i went on and on like that until we had expanded our awareness to the whole body. lastly, i asked the group to come back to the feeling the breath - how the movements of the breath subtly move the whole body and how that feels. that guided portion covered the first ten minutes of the meditation, we sat in silence for the next half hour.

during that long, silent period i was finally able to just relax totally and watch my breath as a curious but somewhat impartial observer. perhaps it helped that i was watching the very small effects of the breath: how the weight and posture shifted slightly with each inhale and exhale. some areas of my chest felt scrunched or stretched during the movement. my head bobbed very slightly with the movement of my chest. it all made this incredibly subtle dance. i wasn’t causing each breath to occur, it was just coming and going naturally on its own. i didn’t feel like i was speeding it up, starting it, cutting it off, adjusting it, effecting a pause, commenting on it, critiquing it; all the things that i normally do when i pay close attention to the breath were gone.

that felt like the most liberated moment in my life. My experience of self disappeared, my awareness was simply relaxed and present. i had a few insights but they were more relaxed flashes instead of streams of thought or story.

my first insight was that i was like a corpse floating on a vast ocean. my corpse self would rise up and fall down with the motion of the water but trying to struggle with that would be pointless, and i couldn’t really even if i tried. like the waves of a sea, my breath was moving my body slowly and rhythmic and i was just there. i didn’t need to do anything to relate to the waves of breath moving me. i didn’t need to do anything to make them happen, or to change them, and i didn’t need any attitude toward them or critique of them. they just were.

you’re probably thinking all this detail picayune. but what startled me deeply was after meditation, that feeling of openness and harmony stayed with me. i’ve felt that way in isolated moments, but this time for hours afterwards i relaxed into the openness. it was ecstatic and raw. but unlike the ecstasy of some intoxication, i was awake and keenly aware of everything. i could walk and interact with people, going to dinner afterwards in fact, but my experience of everyone and everything was like a sea of luminosity and dance and my solid sense of self and form was relaxed. Nothing was a problem.

sometime later i had my second flash of metaphor, that my sense of self was like a clenched fist and for the first time in my life that fist took a break and was relaxed and open. i even visualized the fist and i could watch as that fist would close slightly and i felt my sense of self solidifying, but i could hold it open with just some small intention.

for a couple hours i just ate my dinner and held a conversation, the whole time aware of what was going on around me and interacting with people but everything was different and profoundly luminous and like the first time i had ever experienced it.

when i went home i still felt that openness, and i suspected as i drifted off to sleep that i would wake up returned to the clenched fist state of mind. this morning the feeling faded, and i felt depression and loss trying to grasp at the memory. hopefully the memory will serve as a motivator to sit more often at least. must remember not to be attached to it and disappointed if the next time i sit all this eludes me.

If you're new here, thanks for visiting! Please subscribe to my RSS feed and consider visiting my design-related blog and my personal blog.