You know, I went into that pain earlier today. But I failed to resist the siren’s call of a good bottle of wine, drank it, and am now on to some rum.
I’ve been good lately, mostly, in that I have been meditating twice a day, for 27 minutes each time. In the morning, I do nine minutes focused on just trying to feel my breath. I use the image of a dorje, in which the breath balloons into both my head and my heart after passing through my mouth. It seems to open up heart energy a bit.
Then nine minutes of feeling. I have been focused on my gut lately. I try to imagine every organ, including the intestines, and feel what is in them. Often, the energy is abundantly clear in my outer abdomen. Whatever it is, I accept it and allow it.
Then thirdly, in the morning, I do a Kum Nye exercise from the first set of books. Nine minutes is not really enough for most of them, but it’s better than nothing. This morning, I wished it had lasted longer, but tomorrow it may be the opposite. It’s something. It’s something.
In the evening, I’ve lately been trying to do either 27 minutes or 45 minutes of massage, again per the first set of books. Last night I did my hands.
Something has changed to allow this, since this basic structure is the first thing Tarthang Tulku recommends in the books, and I have found it impossible for me for ten years or so. Perhaps a tad less.
But I see that the first drink for me, signals that the opportunity to make my pain go away had arisen. My pain being what it is, it is rare that I don’t take it all the way to what I will call induced cessation. I cannot honestly say I fully understand people who can have one, feel a bit better, then stop. For me, the gashes are too deep.
But I also don’t want to be maudlin. I like my life. It’s interesting. It’s a new fucking thing every day even when I don’t want a new fucking thing. And that is useful, even if not always what I would have chosen. Quite often, what most of us would have chosen is shit. It’s easy, banal, and probably vaguely ridiculous, even if comforting.
Yeah, so that’s my pep talk today. So go do that thing, and try not to suck at it, mostly.
OK, I’m some percentage serious here, but it’s making me laugh too. Do something creative with whatever reaction you have to this. Make yourself proud. Look at all those unrealized possibilities around you, and introduce yourself to one, learn about it, and don’t be either too greedy or too shy.
Edit: that wasn’t actually what I logged on to write. It’s an odd fact to me that if you walked up to me at random and asked me to talk for 30 minutes it would not be a problem.
The image that hit me, then hurt me, then said in some way “write about this”, was this: I got back to my birth the other day in a meditation. I saw my mother after a long and difficult delivery, still hurting in her “birthing part” (that’s reasonable, right, as a term?) and focused on making sure she was going to be OK, to get over the pain, and figuring out where they were going to room her, and then eventually about holding the baby she just gave birth to. I was a boy, which I was not supposed to be. I don’t think she knew what the hell this thing was, or what the hell to do with it, so she made it up as she went along. She was strongly dissociated and confused and disoriented.
And I felt this. And I looked at this baby, and I realized that there is a field around this child, around all life, around my mother and everything alive, and that the fate of this child is not written either in its genetics, or what happened at birth, or what happened since. Our fates are always much larger than this. We live in swirls, or whirlwinds, or typhoons–of love, of hate, of kindness, of lack–and all of it is intensely interesting and “romantic” for those open to feelings as a kind of seasoning of life.
And I feel my own playfulness. I am a first rate smartass, and a first rate inventor of games and jokes and play of all kinds. But it comes and goes. Sometimes it freezes up entirely. Sometimes I am sober, serious, and people ask me–in bars and elsewhere–if I am a cop, or if I am a veteran. I’ll never forget some drunk chick asking me no less than three times in a bar if I was sure I wasn’t a cop. I just get that look on my face. It’s a “don’t fuck with me” look, combined with a “I see all that you are doing” look, and it’s not entirely an act. In certain moods, I would not fuck with me. I’m untested, but I know what I know, and what I know is a lot of unconventional ways to fuck people up, even before we get to what I may or may not have in my pocket, or what the capabilities of a 270 pound man who does manual labor for a living may be.
So I look at that. Then I look at me laughing, playing, joking. I am a first rate punster and wit, in certain moods. It’s an odd contradiction. Who is this fellow, who is this, and then that?
Well, here is the simple answer: I’m still figuring it out. But it’s an interesting ride.