Category Archives: spirit

Sitting and yoga, oh yeah, and breakthroughs

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

Trauma releasing exercises

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Update: In Feb. 2011, I started my Chronic Stress and Trauma Recovery Challenge. Click the link to read about it. If you’ve done them even once, I’d love for you to comment on your experience(s).

~~~

I wrote about them in my earlier post entitled “Another Book Influences Meditation,” about the book The Revolutionary Trauma Release Process by David Berceli.

I’ve been doing David Berceli’s trauma releasing exercises a couple of times a week for over a month now. This morning I did them and changed it up a bit: during the seventh exercise, when I was lying on my back, knees bent, soles on floor, my legs were cycling through bouts of shaking and stillness. During the still periods, I could feel an electric current running through my legs, and then the shaking would begin again.

This time on impulse, I raised my forearms straight up and just gave my hands a little shake. Immediately, involuntary shaking began in my forearms, which lasted some time. Even when my legs cycled into stillness, my forearms kept shaking.

(Note: When I spontaneously released the blockages from an old trauma while reading Waking the Tiger, my forearms as well as my legs shook, and there was a pins-and-needles sensation from the elbows down and the waist down. Haven’t encountered that sensation again.)

Then I raised my entire arms from the shoulders, and man, they just took off with the shaking. Eventually my right shoulder, but not my left, was also shaking.

This without deliberately stressing my arm muscles the  way I do my leg muscles to incite shaking.

I shook for 20 minutes, and then I meditated.

Soon I realized that the parts of my body that had been shaking (legs, arms, and right shoulder) felt distinctively different from the parts that didn’t shake. The shaken parts felt lighter and cleaner, as if something heavy and a little murky had cleared out of my body.

Further incentive to keep doing these — I would like to experience all the parts of  my body shaking, releasing stress and trauma, and feeling light and clean again.

The Q’ero believe only humans accumulate hucha. They remove it using breathing techniques. The Q’ero probably have never encountered anything like the stressful lives we modern Americans live. (I mentioned hucha and breathing techniques in an earlier post called “Body Scanning Practices.”)

Trauma releasing exercises release vast amounts of hucha.

They also have an effect similar to Carlos Casteneda’s description of recapitulation — you release “other” unclean energy and reclaim “your” clean energy, but without having to dredge up memories one by one and fan your head back and forth with your breathing.

No images, no sounds, no words are required with Berceli’s exercises. They are a purely kinesthetic way of releasing hucha/trauma.

That makes them elegant and accessible.

And so to celebrate…

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After missing a day of meditation on Monday, I didn’t intend to celebrate, but today I realized it is as worthy of celebrating as anything!

I missed a day. What a load off! Now the world knows I’m not perfect. Whee! It feels like a breakthrough!

So today I was at White Crane Pharmacy and bought myself a new crescent-shaped zafu and a zabuton, which I’ve never had before, instead using a couple of folded Mexican blankets for cushioning under my zafu.

My new zafu and zabuton are beautiful. Made by Hugger Mugger, the yoga supply company, the zafu is covered in a foliage print in shades of brown, and the zabuton has a different foliage print in shades of light green and pale blue. Both are 100% cotton.

Fall and spring, yoga and meditation, crescent and square, their energies complement each other in a most aesthetically pleasing way.

When I sat today on the new zafu, I noticed that my sit bones were elevated considerably higher than on my old zafu. My legs naturally fell into siddhasana, which I have learned is also called Burmese-style. It’s like cross-legged but with the uncrossed feet in front, nestling next to each other.

I had an acupuncture session at the AOMA student clinic today. 30 needles! Released lots of gallbladder stagnation in the lower left leg, feel much better now. I decided I couldn’t wait to get in to see my regular acupuncturist. I got to talk to a 4th year student there about what it’s like.

Then I had lunch with my yoga teacher, Eleanor Harris, who is the yoga teacher I give the most credit to for helping me really “get” yoga in my body. Not to mention, she’s just a very wonderful, kind, giving person.

She’s certified to train yoga teachers, and together we are designing a yoga teacher training program that meets Yoga Alliance standards and yet is suitable for someone like me who has practiced for 12 years and picked up a lot during that time.

Then a nice visit with my friend Clarita, seeing her beautiful home and first garden ever. I know she’s gonna love gardening. I helped her find out information online about visiting the Strongheart school in Liberia, learning about that country and what shots she will need to travel there. Nice reciprocation there–she appreciates my online skills, and I appreciate her love of beauty, which shows up in her home and garden.

Then home to find my new massage table had arrived! A gift to myself from my income tax refund. Lots to learn…

All in all, it’s been a good day.

Second breakthrough

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My second big breakthrough in this year of meditating for 30 minutes each day has evolved over the past few days, and I am still integrating it. I can’t say exactly what it’s about yet because it’s a process that must unfold over time, and I don’t want to blindside anyone who’s significantly involved.

This deserves my care and attention, and that means keeping it close until I am clear how to proceed with [what I think are] everyone’s best interests in mind, as best I can.

So, I’m sorry, dear readers, that I can’t say more right now. I am looking forward to the time (hopefully in the next couple of months) when I can just blurt it out and let the world know!

This breakthrough is different from the first breakthrough, which was a shift in my point of view. This one  involves actually making some big changes in interacting with the world.

Change within followed by change without.

I feel excited! I feel a little intimidated but not scared. There are a lot of details to be worked out. Say a prayer and send loving energy if you feel so inclined.

~~~

Speaking of readers, as of today there have been 607 hits on this blog. Thank you! Thank you! THANK YOU!

I haven’t gotten any feedback on my decision to slow down on posting. If you want to share your opinion, give feedback, ask questions, make comments, it’s pretty easy to leave a comment. I believe you can even be anonymous. I read them all, delete the ones that are obviously spam, and approve the others for posting. Pretty simple.

I’d love to hear from you, even just a hello.

The marvel of awareness

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Nothing too memorable about my zazen this morning, just marveling that everything I experience is inside awareness. Everything I experience is awareness. Experience is awareness.

Who can even know how big awareness actually is? Maybe you, I, and everything in the universe, material and immaterial, every thought, feeling, idea, and dream, are made of awareness. Or maybe we are awareness.

Maybe the universe is awareness, and each of us is an instrument of its awareness. Whether we want to or not! Whether we try to or not! Whether we’re awake or not!

I understand those pictures of deities with a thousand eyes all over their bodies now. They are trying to convey this specific awareness.

Now the question is, how is it that we can not notice this? It’s like there’s been a conspiracy to make all other kinds of things important, and that’s where I spent my attention. Where I spent my life.

But this has been the underlying truth all along. Just waiting for me to recognize it. Like that dream I had years ago, where I was watching some people dancing, and they were dancing because I was watching. Reciprocal awareness.

We are swimming in awareness all the time! All 7 billion of us humans. Not to mention plants and rocks and soil and air and stardust. All aware.

Ah! Existence is awareness!

Now try this: re-read this and every time I wrote the word “awareness,” substitute the words “being aware”.

Awareness is everything

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Awareness is everything.

Okay, I’m going to bed.