Messy Guru

Off The Wall

I completed my third Vipassana Course (2 sat and 1 served) this morning.  Ten days of silence and intense self reflection and solitude.  I had no night terrors or emotional upheavals.  I walked and sat for days in silent wonder.  Amazed at nature.  Amazed by the process of undoing an unruly Mind.  Huge pockets of gratitude filled up the endless hours of sitting.

On the eighth day at 4:30am I was meditating in my room.  Moving my awareness utilizing the Vipassana Meditation Technique.  I happened to glance up at the wall opposite of the bed and see a reflection of the window on my wall.  It showed the entire outline of a window along with the individual slats of the shades. 

A perfect outline of a window to look at.  Immediately the thought came to me that I had mistaken myself to be the reflection.  A shadow of oneself.  The Voice in my head became the shadow on the wall.  It was perfectly clear.  An image of a window cannot make itself to be a real window.  No matter how hard it tries to be.  It is not.

I sat there stunned.  Here it was right in front of me.  Perfectly obvious and placed for my viewing and understanding. A perfect moment of clarity.  All the years of anxiety and frustration melted away into this one moment. 

Mistaken identity. 

When I came home I started reading "I am That" by Nisaragadatta:  "Awareness with an object we call witnessing.  When there is also self-identification with the object, caused by desire or fear, such a state is called a person.  In Reality there is only one state; when distorted by self-identification it is called a person, when colored with the sense of being, it is the witness; when colorless and limitless, it is called the Supreme."

When I am in fear, I am a shadow believing I am something I am not.  How perfectly clear I can see that.

 

Two Weeks Old

I watched on Oprah today, Chely Wright explain her struggle with coming out of the closet as a Country and Western singer.  After a lot of lies and broken relationships with men and herself she felt it would better to kill herself than to face her truth.  With a 9mm in her mouth and crying she put the gun down and decided to face it and reveal herself in truth and honesty.

Nobody else in the history of that genre of music has come out before.  I admire her courage.  I am not sure her audience will embrace her and she isn't sure either.  When Oprah asked how she now felt, she replied, "like I am two weeks old". 

Her reply stunned me.  What a wonderful and descriptive response to that question.  We all want to go back to a time and place when everything was fresh and young.  Our innocence was our way of Being.  I believe we can all still find that place that has not been touched by others or by life. 

I leave tomorrow on my 3rd Vipassanaa Course.  10 days of Noble Silence and intense meditation.  I am looking at it this time as boot camp for the Voice in my head.  I am excited to bring the very thing that has caused me the most intense anxiety and fear to a place to be looked at in truth and honesty.  Kinda like you would if your body had a form of cancer and needed extreme measures to rid the body and Mind of its toxins and poisons. 

Living a life of fear and anxiety is not a way to live.  For anybody. 

I want to know the truth of it.  All of it.  And remember what it is like to be two weeks old again.

Demons Be Damned

Finally a breakthrough. 

Finally.

It appears that over the past few weeks, I have stumbled upon a solution to my never ending anxiety and frustrations with my story telling Mind. 

Finally.

It's not perfect.  My anxiety keeps moving.  My Mind is now  plotting to see if there are any holes in it.  Ha!  I welcome all  thoughts into it.  It is a combination of Geneen Roth's premise of meeting all feelings with kindness, understanding and allowing them to be with curiosity and Nisaragadatta's suggestion to keep looking at the "I am" in your Mind.

Sound confusing?

Try living in here where it is.  And now isn't. 

Imagine a place where everything is accepted.  Eckhart Tolle tells us how to live in the Present moment by bringing, "acceptance, enjoyment or enthusiasm" to every situation.  I am excited about employing this strategy in my daily life.  I look forward to my anxiety attacks at 2 am.

Our demons become our greatest teachers.  It is the way out.  The darkness becomes an opportunity to become the Light.  We transform ourselves by going through it.

Your darkness is also your divinity. 

Nothing Needs to Happen (Other than what is happening)

I spend a lot of time wanting something to happen that is not happening.  Wanting it to be different in my Mind.  So then I can rest or Be.  As if a movement in my Mind vs Reality can change Reality.  My Mind wants it so.

At any cost.

To me or the Mind.  The Mind keeps checking with itself on whether it is ok or not.  Wanting the thought to make the Mind be still.  Life does not seem to be a safe place to be.  Something is always wanting to annihilate me. 

Why can I not see this different?

I just read a quote by Wayne Dyer:

"It makes no sense to worry about the things you have no control over, because if you have no control over them, it makes no sense to worry about them. And also, it makes no sense to worry about the things you do have control over, because if you have control over them, it makes no sense to worry about them. And there goes everything that it is possible to worry about. Either you have control or you don't, and worry is just a waste of your precious, present moments."

Even my Mind is Silent about that.

 

 

Moving or Stopping

I realized today I move only when fear of otherwise may happen.  Not because I want to.  Only because if I don't I will be annihilated.  This realization came when I saw Oprah explain why it is so hard for her to say No to a request and also her discovery of why it started. Her grandmother used to beat her and then make her show with no emotion that she was just beaten.  As though by not showing her emotion it would negate her grandmothers actions. Never allowing her to show her emotion of the beating.

Imagine a billionaire having a problem with annihilation.  Having  her money, power and fame is not enough from stopping this feeling from happening.  I then realized whatever my Mind has been looking for is not the answer either.

I have never been able to rest long enough in my Mind to show that I am safe or secure.  Everything, including my job had my security.  I was not enough by myself.  Just standing there.

Alone.

So, I am going to move now because I do.  Not because.  I will arrive or I will not.

My sister had a quote today on her blog I just love:

“Keep on going, and the chances are that you will stumble on something, perhaps when you are least expecting it.  I never heard of anyone ever stumbling on something sitting down.” 

   ~Charles F. Kettering

 

 

Voices Carry

I realized in yoga tonight that I have been listening mostly to the Voice in my head.  It told me my Reality.  It told me what was true or not true.  I felt an immense sense of sadness when I realized this.  Imagine only believing what the Voice thought was it's Reality. 

I also feared things that it feared.  Liked what it liked.  Loved what it loved.  I am not even sure if I was there at all.  Imagine running to somebody and asking them if it was true or not.  This is what it feels like to have a Voice for Me in my head. 

The Voice must have started for one reason and continued on for another.  It must have taken a brutal Reality and told a different story.  Perhaps to hide the pain and shame.  Allowing me to be in a place which was unbearable.  And then living as though its not.

I am still living with the Voice.  I don't always know when its speaking for me.  Carrying on its agenda of making Reality different than what it is.  I want to know the Truth now.  I want to know all of it.  Good, Bad and the Ugly.  All of it.  I want to then feel it too.  All of it.

 

 

No Me There

My thoughts got the best of me last night.  Again.  It starts somewhere up in my Mind and then covers Reality.  My dreams, thoughts and Reality all seemed mixed up together in a boiling pot.  It would seem that Reality would be easy to keep track of.  My Mind appears to overpower it and then an epic fight begins.

Around 5:00am I realized it was all thought.  A wasted night of sleep.  All for naught.  It leaves me reeling and exhausted.  It just seems relentless.  A waste of time.  The gagging and nausea came with the morning sun.  Like a never ending chemotherapy treatment.

I also could feel parts of me still playing allegiance to people no longer serving me.  Waiting for them to make me ok before I can be ok.  Nuts.  Also wanting leadership and direction from confused people. Reverting back to childhood roles and waiting for a grownup to appear with clarity and direction.

The biggest surprise and disappointment I discovered today was that my whole perception of seeing the world is wrong. My left brain takes in data and processes it and spits out wrong data and images. I then take the world to be what the Mind is telling me to be my Reality.

Impossible.

Impossible that I could go so long and so far with so little information.  No wonder I never felt safe or protected.  Hate becomes Love and Love becomes confusing.  Nothing matches.  My insides or outsides.  The Me that is Here is There.  Reality is left empty without me.  

It is all quiet now.  I am here.  Looking around again in amazement. 

I can leave a room without knowing it.

No Me There.  

 

 

Feeling This

I am reading a fascinating book by Geneen Roth, "Women, Food and God".  In it she writes: "When I am willing to question and therefore feel whatever is there-terror, hatred, anger--with curiosity, the feelings relax, because they are met with kindness and openness instead of resistance and rejection.  To the degree that my feelings are familiar, that I've felt them before in similar situations--feeling left out, rejected, abandoned--the willingness to allow them offers a completely different scenario than the situations in which they first developed. 

Recurrent negative feelings--those that loop in the same cycles again and again without changing--are unmet knots of our past that got frozen in time for the precise reason that they were not met with kindness or acceptance."

I love that I can meet my feelings kindness.  All of my feelings.  I also like the word "curiosity" in the exploration and the meeting of our feelings.  Michael Brown writes, "Joy is feeling everything."

I am going to attend my third Vipassana course this month.  I want to explore how I feel with acceptance and kindness.  My last courses were a study of fear and wanting to "bolt".  My intention is to feel everything.  Allowing it all to be in my Presence.