Category Archives: breakthrough

3,000 views! Thank you, readers!

Posted on by
1

Just a quick note to share my gratitude with you, the readers of my blog. Today my odometer rolled over, so to speak, and I have reached the milestone of 3,000 views!

Last summer, after a jump in readers, the number 3,000 came to mind as a goal I hoped to reach by the end of this year.  Now I’ve reached it a month and a half early. That means the rest of this year is pure lagniappe! Or icing on the cake, or gravy, if you prefer those metaphors.

Thank you for stopping by.

The number doesn’t really tell me much. It’s just the number of people who have viewed my blog.

It doesn’t tell me which posts and topics you like most or which titles whet your curiosity. I do know that a few of you are subscribers, some are occasional readers via Facebook and Twitter (@zafu_report), and some find my blog by accident, searching for information on, say, trauma releasing exercises or brain waves.

I posted an analysis on October 1st, and the way I put it all together bears repeating:

What I get from this analysis is that you guys, my readers, are curious about body/mind/emotions/spirit connections. You want to read about discovering/returning to some kind of integrated state of healthiness and wholeness. You’re interested in ways to frame experience, to give it context and perspective. And reading about geeky brain wave states does not put you off!

The brain geeks among you have something to look forward to. I’ve been experimenting with theta waves and will post about it before too long.

Writing and reading are a reciprocal exchange. All I can ask is that you come back, enjoy yourself, and please do not hesitate to give me feedback and comments!

Again, thank you for stopping by.

The joy of being a Five

Posted on by
Reply

I finally figured something out, something that has been fishy for a long time where I work, that no one will speak openly about, like a shameful family secret.

I have wracked my brain trying to figure out what makes sense about this situation, which has been rather crazy-making.

I went into a theta state listening to a new CD, and I got an image of being in a rowboat out on the water, and the large and long arms of a woman who remained submerged reached up and grabbed control of the boat.

Oh, and when the other chief instigator of crazy-making, the one who is not submerged but deeply connected with long-armed woman’s energy, came into my office to say hello, I just happened to be watching this hilarious video.

The image and that “coincidence” tell me a story about what’s really going on.

I’m going to use this blog post to address this shadowy, long-armed woman. Everyone else who reads it, please pray for the most wounded of the two women to find peace. We will work on the other one later.

I know who you are, and it is time for you to completely let go. Way past time. This is no way to be living your life, through someone else.

I am sorry that you are in so much emotional pain and carry such a great need to control things. There must be a great well of tender vulnerability underneath that furious need to control others.

Your path to true happiness — and it is as available to you as to anyone else — lies in fully acknowledging your vulnerability and your fear.

Life is short, time passes quickly, and with it our only chance. Soften.

Let go of the need to control, let down your guard, and heal your heart.

By doing this, amazingly, you become able to lovingly protect yourself, tend to your own life, and become the magnanimous, self-surrendering, courageous, forgiving person that you really are.

You can find the help you need.

Best wishes to you. Now go your own way.

Writing a new chapter in my life

Posted on by
5

Just finished 6 weeks of cleansing and flushing my body of parasites and toxins and nasty old stuff that needs to go.

Now it feels ripe to do the same for my worldly goods.

I’m downsizing. Selling my East Austin house where I’ve lived for the past 10 years, making some big changes.

I’m hoping to buy a used vintage trailer in good shape and wanting to find a nice place to put it — on someone’s big lot or country acreage not too far out.

The trailer parks on Barton Springs Road would also be a good location, if I can get in there.

Or perhaps I’ll rent a trailer first and see how I like it.

Releasing, shedding, letting go, removing, reducing, downsizing, lightening up… I have too much stuff. I’m so ready for clean, spare, minimal. I could have so much more free time to do things I love.

So much to do… Prune the branch that hangs too low in front of the house, obscuring the view. Clear the entry path. Clean the house and make it ready for prospective buyers. Take stuff to Habitat and Goodwill and Half Price Books. Sell stuff on Craigslist. Maybe even sell the house on Craigslist!

I’m feeling my way through this, flying by the seat of my pants. Wanting to find a good neighbor for Bruce, someone who will honor the house and remodel, not tear it down and build ugly.

This house has been good to me, and it’s time to move on. I’m preparing for finishing my work at my current job sometime mid-2011. I’ve committed to stay through the session. Hopefully the last day of May will be my last day there.

And… I’ve been accepted into AOMA (acupuncture school). I deferred my entrance until next July, so I can do all this stuff at a pace I can handle.

I’m not 100% sure it’s right for me, but it sure feels like I’m moving in the right direction, and nothing else I’ve found resonates so much with me. Oriental medicine feels right, and it’s daunting. Three and a half years of eastern and western medicine is pretty intense, and it’s been years since I’ve been in school. But how fascinating, exotic, and practical. It will definitely keep my left and right brain hemispheres working!

In many ways, these changes are a side effect of meditation. Questions arise: How am I not living my right life? What is my right life? What do I love to do so much that I would do it for free (and making a living at it is icing on the cake)?

Words, images, dreams, realizations arise. The answers I’ve found so far are: doing/teaching/learning yoga, learning about the subtle body’s energies, learning to think like a Daoist, helping others and myself on the path toward health and enlightenment, being of joyous service. And writing.

I hope you’ll wish me good luck and lend me your support.

An amazing surrender process

Posted on by
1

Bill Hornback sends daily emails about Eckhardt Tolle’s The Power of Now. I really liked this one and asked him if I could post about it. He said yes.

Bill writes:

Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now – “The pain you create is always some form of nonacceptance, some form of unconscious resistance to what is.”  Ouch! This is so true it hurts!  Since resistance to what is does not work, let’s chat about surrender. 

A few years ago, I went thru a surrender process once, and it was . . . amazing.  Until you’ve gone through this process, or one like it, you are just ASSUMING you have surrendered or know what that means. Perhaps instead of surrendering, life has only been a test of your flexibility, perhaps.  Surrendering, especially for controllers like me, is almost too difficult an experience to describe . . . but I’ll try. 

Imagine every reference point of your life, everything you know, every tangible object, every dream of the future, all being taken away from you, without any expectation of return . . . and imagine being good with that. Imagine that you’re OK with all that. Imagine it’s because it’s as if your mind has been stripped from you, or at least turned off, and you experience what it is like to just BE.  Perhaps you understand, for the first time, that nothing outside yourself defines you. Nothing outside your SELF establishes or diminishes your Being.  You are, and will Be.  Perhaps for the first time, you KNOW, truly KNOW that you can create what you want to create, and would if everything you had disappeared.  You are thankful, truly thankful, for the relationships you have, because you know those relationships were not created by you alone, they are the other person’s choice too, and they chose you, just as you chose them.  You didn’t control the situation, you were only part of it, and were blessed by the mutual choice.  Imagine understanding that your life starts over from this moment forward.  If you can imagine all this, you may have a glimpse of what it means to “surrender to what is.” My life changed for the better from that moment. One of the first things I did was choose Julie again, and luckily for me, she chose me too. 
I’m sorry if this is seems scattered or incoherent.  I tried, but the experience was, as I said, difficult to describe.  Many changes I’ve made in my life since then revolve around the concept of surrendering control, which is significantly easier to do at this point.

So, will you “surrender to what is” today, or beat your head against that wall time and again?
Intent: I will look for situations where I need to surrender to what is.
Outcome: Everything will become easier, simpler.
Presup: Respecting every person’s model of the world, including my own, is immensely useful.

I’m not sure I have experienced anything like this. In fact, I’m pretty sure I haven’t, except maybe for a few moments in my deepest meditations, when being just comes really alive.

I get that this is difficult to talk or write about, since it is a nonverbal experience. It is awesome to know that this is possible for someone and therefore possible for me.

I’d love to know more about how it’s done — as a guided meditation, perhaps.

Developing the skills of meditation

Posted on by
Reply

I was thinking today, three-quarters through my year of daily sitting, about skills that I have developed so far.

It took about three months for me to be able to sit for 30 minutes without spending a good chunk of that time being aware of some pain somewhere in my body. Usually it wasn’t major pain, though, but sometimes the pain seemed to accumulate during a session, and right before the timer would go off, I’d start feeling like I couldn’t stand it any more.

That probably doesn’t count as a real skill. It’s more like acclimating the body to the practice. It felt like grace when the pain (mostly) went away.

Most of the pain was around my sacrum and left sacroiliac joint, where I’ve had injury. Whatever. Do not let this stop you from meditating. You will not experience pain like I did. Yours will be different. And you will learn from it. Unjudged, pain is sensation, pure and simple.

It also takes core strength to be able to keep my spine erect for 30 minutes while unsupported. I had this ability before I started sitting, developed from both yoga and sitting on an exercise ball with my back unsupported at my job.

If you’re thinking of starting a sitting practice, it’s a good idea to work on your core strength.

Another skill for physically sitting is knowing that your knees should be lower than your pelvis. I have used a round zafu, a crescent zafu, folded yoga blankets, and a yoga bolster to create this posture.

The physical skills of a sitting practice are far easier to describe than the awareness skills.

I’ve posted quite a bit about how I’ve been given the instruction “whole body awareness” by my Zen meditation teacher, and my various explorations of how to do that. It’s been a koan — something you try to “figure out” but can’t, and meanwhile you pay of attention to your actual experience.

One of the things I’m recognizing now is that being able to shift between what’s in the foreground of my attention (hearing a siren outside) to what’s in the background (hearing everything I can hear — the siren, traffic sounds, a helicopter, birds, squirrels, conversations, my refrigerator, my breathing, my cat purring, my tinnitus) is a skill developed in meditation.

Hearing everything I hear without labeling it: another skill to practice. Let it all in and be unnamed!

To further develop meditation skill, you can take that ability to move from narrow to wide from one sense (hearing) and include another sense, such as touch.

Expand to include your other senses: what you see (even with your eyes closed, unless you are sitting in pitch darkness, some light comes through your closed eyelids, smell, and taste.

Include your thoughts and your emotional state.

Let your senses blend with each other. Let them merge. Keep moving between the foreground and background, from narrow to broad awareness.

Another skill of meditation has to do with size or location, perspective or point of view. This is the hardest thing for me to write about right now, because I’m exploring a new edge of my sitting experience.

When I first started trying to become aware of my whole body after months of my attention being drawn to body parts that either hurt or felt good, I had to learn how to “back off”.

To become aware of my whole body, I had to somehow enlarge my awareness.

Now, that’s not something you hear often. “Hey, you, enlarge your awareness!”

At first I though this meant taking in less detail to get a bigger “picture”. It’s not that the detail goes away. I can zoom back in, so to speak. And it’s not visual, and not like a camera. Those are metaphors.

Here lately, I have experienced backing off even further, to where I experience whole awareness — aware of my body as an just another artifact of my nervous system, not really “my body”. Meanwhile, my nervous system is taking in everything.

There is not a clear way for me to tell you how to “back off” in meditation. It’s like I stumbled upon it by accident, and at this point, I don’t quite know what I did, but I do know that I experienced an interesting shift.

Maybe by the end of this year, I can be more clear. I appreciate you readers who bear with me in this exploration. I think we are getting some nuggets out of it.

And when you can let all of your awareness of the background become the foreg

Sitting and yoga, oh yeah, and breakthroughs

Posted on by
1

Today I want to report on my sitting practice. I haven’t written much about it lately. If you’ve been keeping up, you’ll recall that I finally got serious about following my teacher’s instructions, to practice “whole body awareness”.

Today I crossed a threshold. Rather than being aware of my whole body, body awareness dropped more into the background, and whole awareness moved more into the foreground. And somehow they merged.

Maybe a better description for my experience is that for a few moments, “my body” was not me. There wasn’t really a me, an I, except for experiencing awareness. Sounds, body sensations, thoughts — all aspects of awareness, all one.

Okay, I know some of you may stumble upon this post and think this is crazy talk, that it doesn’t make any sense — unless you yourself have explored these realms of being.

You know what? It doesn’t make sense to me either! Making sense is where the trouble started! I am curious, so I will keep exploring.

I’m doing the best I can to describe in words something that is essentially a nonverbal experience.

Before sitting, I did yoga. We worked on Sun Salutations in yoga teacher training last night, each of us leading and innovating. It was very fun and a real workout! They’re like jazz — infinite variations are possible. Amazingly, I can lead a long improvised series of poses for the right side of the body– and remember the same sequence on the left! It just comes back to me.

So before yoga this morning, I did one l-o-n-g sun salutation, making each movement between the individual poses into a little vinyasa to repeat over and over, then HOLDING down dog, chaturanga, bhujangasana to build strength. I made a lovely stew of Iyengar and vinyasa today.

I’m working on a longer post about something the film Eat, Pray, Love triggered. When I work it through a bit more, I’ll post. It feels big!

Experience yourself not waiting

Posted on by
1

I’ve been trying to think of words to describe how I’m experiencing myself these days. It’s different than before I began “the year of sitting daily.”

Expanded. I am going through a period of expansion, and interestingly, there is more inward expansion than outward expansion, although both are happenin’.

My awareness of myself has increased and includes awareness of my being, not just awareness of my doing.

Friend Alan Steinborn posted this on Facebook: “waiting is purely psychological…”

I got juiced by experimenting with what it is like to not wait, to let go of waiting.

I responded, “wow, it is! what happens when you’re not waiting (and awake)?”

Alan responded, “basically, you know you are not waiting when ‘when’ carries no meaning….then what? just this…”

Yes.

I invite you to do this little experiment. Experience yourself waiting (which I realize I do quite a lot without thinking about it).

Now experience yourself not waiting.

There’s a shift, yeah??? Which one do you like better?

My spiritual awakening story

Posted on by
1

This is as good a time as any to tell you the story of how I first came to experience myself as more than just this body and personality.

Although I was raised as a church-going child, I would not have described my parents as particularly spiritual. My dad was an Episcopal minister, and that was his primary livelihood until I was 11. There was no question but that we would attend church, and I did it with gusto. I liked the feeling of being in the church, especially when it was silent. The high ceilings, stained glass, smell of beeswax candles, pipe organ, rich fabrics, hard pews, dark wood…

I sang the hymns and memorized the prayers. My brothers and I snuck over and rang the bell one Saturday, which was fun. We took turns swinging from the bell rope. Later we got spanked. My mother often seemed tense about our behavior around church members.

I liked Jesus from what I’d heard, although he seemed remote, and I pondered on the Holy Ghost. Sacraments – the outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual grace – held fascination for me, but grace seemed elusive, something that adults were smug about and didn’t let kids in on.

Church-going tapered off in adolescence. In my 20s, I became a “Chreaster,” attending church only at Christmas-Easter .

Fast forward to August 20, 1984.  I was on my first ever solitary vacation – five days/4 nights in Santa Fe – at age 31. I left my 3-year-old with her dad and took off from Norman, Oklahoma, where I was working on a degree. It was a budget trip – I drove and stayed at a hostel-type place.

During the days I walked a lot, marveling at the quality of the light and clarity in the air there, and visited museums, art galleries, did the usual touristy stuff in SF.

In the late summers then, and maybe still, the Santa Fe Opera held performances of  the most well-known arias performed by opera students from around the country.  It was truly only about the singing – none of the dialogue, no sets, no costumes. I’m thinking now that it was a massive audition by opera students for jobs with opera companies, and the public was invited to listen.

The performance was at 9 pm on a Monday night, and I had driven to the opera house earlier that day to get my $5 ticket. I got to explore the marvelous architecture of the Santa Fe opera. It’s an open-air facility. A roof overhangs the stage and cantilevers out over the audience, from what I recall, leaving the sides of the stage open to the beautiful mountain scenery.

I returned at 9 pm, wearing jeans, carrying my backpack. The performances had started. Not many people were there. I stood at the back, just taking it all in. I let my backpack slide to the ground.

A soprano was singing. I have no idea which aria it was, but the sound was beautiful, unearthly.

The skies to the north were storming.  From the back, I looked down at the singer and noticed lightning bolts flashing to the sides and behind of the stage. I could almost smell the ozone. I began to feel chills, and then…

… it was as if a bolt of lightning pierced my crown chakra and went down through my body into the earth and stayed there for several long moments.

I didn’t know what hit me, but I definitely felt hit by something. There was no pain, and it didn’t feel like an assault. I was hit by light coming from some unknown source, a light I couldn’t see but could sense.

The experience gradually faded. I could hardly listen to the rest of the performances, I was so puzzled about it. Why me? Why then and there?

I was familiar with the concept of chakras and had been practicing yoga for a couple of years, but I didn’t have anyone to talk about this with who could tell me anything I didn’t already know.

It was an expansive moment in a small life that had no context for it. It shook me. The invisible hand of God threw a different kind of lightning bolt into my head, and it pierced me through and through.

After that, I definitely noticed when my crown chakra was open, and later my third-eye chakra, and so on. I  have since come to understand that the crown doesn’t open for many people, and yet all I have to do is put my attention there, and it opens.

My perspective now is that it was an initiation into my energy body.  Was I chosen? If so, for what? Who can know the truth of this?

I do know this. It was grace.  And I am attracted to energy consciousness, energy movement, energy healing.

Open mind, no expectation

Posted on by
Reply

In the practice of meditation, concentrating too heavily on the technique brings all kinds of mental activities, frustrations, and sexual and aggressive fantasies. So you keep just on the verge of your technique, with 25 percent of your attention. Another 25 percent is relaxing, a further 25 percent relates to making friends with oneself, and the last 25 percent connects with expectation — your mind is open to the possibility of something happening during this practice session.These four aspects of mindfulness have been referred to as the four wheels of a chariot.The ideal number of wheels we should have on our chariot is four, the four techniques of meditation: concentration, openness, awareness, and expectation. That leaves a lot of room for play. That is the approach in the buddhadharma, the Buddhist teachings. A lot of people in the lineage have practiced that way and have actually achieved a perfect state of enlightenment in one lifetime.

The fourth wheel of meditative attention, according to Chogyam Trungpa, is expectation. I’ve done a halfway-through-the-year assessment of the first three wheels, and now it’s time to address this one.

It is very difficult to have no expectation. I mean, don’t we all expect that the sun will set tonight and rise in the morning, that we will experience that next day, that next meal, that next greeting of a friend or loved one? Intellectually we may know that this isn’t always true, but it usually takes a great act of chaos for us to really get it, a deep awakening.

I just do the best I can with this one, and the best I know how to be open is to be as completely in the present as possible.

When thoughts of the past and the future are not arising, what’s left is the present, and in this six months of sitting, I have been surprised to discover that the present is vast. I notice more of what I didn’t notice before. Refinements of breathing, hearing, feeling, much more awareness of my own inner experience.

I’ve had what I call a breakthrough, and it didn’t happen how I thought it might. A radical thought crossed my mind, and I quickly suppressed it, fearing its consequences. It kept coming back, and it was a process for me to clearly understand and accept that it was true.

That thought was that everything is awareness and awareness is everything. Nothing exists outside of awareness. And it’s my awareness that knows this.

Having accepted its truth, I know that this radical thought has been at work and at play in my everyday life. Ironically, it seems to have made me more selfish, in the sense that I do not want to sacrifice myself any more to being less than I am, to fearing my own light, as Nelson Mandela/Marianne Williamson said. I want to be all that I am, to live the life that I’m best suited for – not someone else’s idea of a good life, but my idea of my good life.

That, my friends, is not too much to ask. Truly, it is the only thing to ask.

The non-breakthrough

Posted on by
Reply

A breakthrough is different from slow, incremental change. The word “break” indicates a suddenness.

In my experience, breakthroughs are fairly rare and rarely happen all of a piece. Even breakthroughs occur incrementally.

Breakthroughs are glamorous, the celebrities of change. Non-breakthrough change (I wish there was another word for that) is sometimes so slow and incremental, you don’t even notice it, like a child doesn’t notice his or her growth, until clothes don’t fit or new furniture is needed.

But others, especially those who don’t see the child that often, do notice growth.

I feel like I am in a period of non-breakthrough change. It happens every day when I sit. There are no amazing revelations. Just a slow sea-change in how I experience myself, and since we see the world as we are, how I experience the world.

I sit and experience more of being centered in my body than I ever have. I notice more of my experience. I am more present to my actual experience.

I’m doing it! This was one of my conscious goals when beginning this year of sitting daily, to be more present to my actual experience.

And for those aunts and uncles who don’t see me that often, the feedback I often get from the world is that I am calm.

I appreciate that.