plunge

I wasn't really ready to meditate until about 2 years ago. I vaguely remember what it was like when I'd try... something like when you try to body surf and get caught by a wave and tossed around, smashing face against sand, inhaling salt water through the nose, getting the bathing suit filled with grit.

Why did it feel like that? I have an idea. I think it was the strength of intense unresolved psychic traumas and fears that buffeted me so much I'd feel queasy, but in an unconscious way, so that I hardly knew what was happening. I think Buddhists would talk bout these forces as "winds."

In the year or two before I started to meditate I went through pockets of intense upheaval, as if I was allowing karma to arise, pay my debts and get on with it. As the months went on, I experienced a death-in-life every so often, when some long held issue or belief about myself or others that limited my experience of the world would emerge from my energy field, come to a head, erupt, dissolve, dissolve so completely it was as if it had never existed in the first place. Gone. Attachments renunciated, but not deliberately and consciously, but as if my magic, or as a product of me getting out of the way so my higher self could kick my posterior to high heaven, saying "enough is enough!" It hurt. And then it was over. And then there was bliss, and stillness.

I believe Hindu Gurus such as Maharshi call this process letting go of "sheaths." I think that' very apt. On the other side of those sheaths, I started to meet the goddess behind all goddesses, Tara-Fatima-Guadalupe-Kali-Prajnapamitra-Yemia, who set my heart on fire with her illuminating lamp. Let the love that she lit there spread to all living things in the form of deep and true compassion.

So then finally it changed, and it became not only comfortable for me to hang out with myself in the darkness of my closed eyes, but very appealing, weighted by a profound blissful stillness. It was like slipping into a shallow ocean alive with little electric fish that buzzed and tingled while waves of warmth rippled deliciousness through this void I call myself, and within, an immense, soothing anchor. Work with shaman Joe Monkman helped me greatly in gaining a level of comfort with being in the present moment, in my body, with myself, and helped pave a path for me to go deeper, finding in myself that which can nurture, warm, and brighten and pacify my mind.