My teacher reminded me again today that in order to be truly yogic (loving all, including myself) I need to release the painful, negative energy attached to my own memories.
In short, I need to sympathize with my self.
HOW? It takes faith and balance: equal amounts of courage and wisdom – and it MUST come from a place of love (the absence of judgment: acceptance).
Yes – it’s the Serenity Prayer. THINK IT. ACT IT.
THAT gets us 80% of the way to eternal bliss according to the ancient Raja Yoga text. That’s the easy part: thinking and acting with complete self-awareness.
The last 20% of the journey to everlasting peace consists of preparing to pray (15%) and actually praying (5%) – but not the way I was taught as an Episcopal Acolyte, to look outwardly for guidance.
Meditation
Meditation preceded prayer as we typically think of it. The practice of reverently searching for universal Truth is literally prehistoric; it’s the basis of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras which are the basis of the Serenity Prayer.
The practice of sitting still in reverence and gratitude for the miracle of one’s life grew out of a time in human history when our ancestors were beginning to realize that the whole “sacrificing something to please God” only worked half the time (like flipping a penny).
Meditation turned the whole “Hey God” thing upside-down, inviting us to sacrifice/offer the most valuable thing we each uniquely have to give: our time.
When we meditate, we sit still, maintaining a reverential attitude of appreciation and compassion, settling first our conscious mind (thoughts accompanied by the voice in our head) and then the three progressively-subtle functions of our typically sub-conscious mind: senses, memory, and ego: the source of our fears and desires.
We do it with love, curiosity, compassion, patience, and awareness – without judgment (mimicking consciousness itself) all in an effort to draw closer to consciousness.
Why? The awareness OF our thoughts (our consciousness) is as different from our thoughts as our thoughts are from our body!
The awareness OF our thoughts is not of-this-earth!! It never changes!! As far as we’re concerned, it is eternal and universal: yours is EXACTLY like mine, yet simultaneously uniquely aware of our respective personal, perpetually-changing thoughts and bodies!
Prayer
Somehow over the millennia the mental discipline of meditation…
searching internally for Truth or evidence of God – lovingly calming one’s mind in hopes of glimpsing – behind the chaos of normal thought – our eternally-still, serene, compassionate essence: the awareness OF our thoughts (the aspect of each of us that Amma says is essentially divine).
…itself was turned upside-down and morphed into an exercise in looking outside of ourselves for guidance, fulfillment and restoration.
Personal story
Part of me died when I was 12….
When I was 12, I had my heart ripped out, squashed and stomped on. We’ll call her “Holly”.
Part of me died that sunny day at the public swimming pool when one of Holly’s friends returned the ring I’d given my true love earlier that summer, and let me know that I was “too slow” for Holly – evidenced by the fact that at that moment, I had no idea what the hell she was talking about!!
I consciously killed a part of myself that day out of self-preservation. I NEVER wanted to experience THAT again. I was 12.
Now I’m 60, and my teacher says if I want to be more emotionally available to students, I have to suffer through it all over again. Lord, I hate her sometimes!
But it didn’t really…it was just buried.
But it wasn’t a 12 year-old pubescent girl that gutted my heart and triggered a tsunami of grief (that kept me bedridden and in tears for two days) and consciously began construction of an emotional wall that would give 45 a stiffy – she was just the last straw. My emotional suffering and scars go back almost 12 years before she came along.
So how do I get release the pain that fuels my anger?
Like a witch’s curse, my teacher says that I must re-experience the pain that 12 year-old Holly dropped like Thor’s hammer on my blissful naiveté. OUCH, and here’s the tricky part: the re-triggering must be precipitated by someone else.
The idea is that now – as a presumed adult – I can absorb and release the emotional trauma I’ve been lugging around in this old memory bank – and thus weaken its ability to derail my good behavior!!
“Suffering is growth” says my @#%^& teacher!!
So please bear with me as I chase down my own inner dragons, so that I may better connect with and assist those who come to me in pain!
Meditation isn’t easy, but neither is suffering. The teacher is also a student.
Meditation provides stress relief and is available to everyone.
God bless us all, Allan
