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I’ve been thinking a lot about my relations with people, how to maintain my deeper connections and get past the sense of alienation that arises when such connections appear to dissolve without warning.  Last night, still mulling over my interpersonal frustrations, I reached a point of having no ground, not really knowing what to hold on to, people seeming very ephemeral.  I wrote down some thoughts about feeling confused and how much pain that causes me. 

Finally, I went to the Diamond Way Buddhist Center here in town and meditated for two hours.  At first, my emotions roiled.  I was dizzy with sadness, confusion, and loneliness, feeling a bit broken inside and irritated to find myself in a place I haven’t sunk to in years.  After about twenty minutes, my focus on the sensory imagery comprising the “refuge meditation” produced a sedative effect.  My mind relaxed into the mantras, and the turmoil dissolved into open space and stillness.  Somewhere in the recesses of my consciousness, the energies were rearranging themselves, processing and resolving.  I left with a feeling of perceptual freshness, and my friends at the center gave me a big, warm hug.

Then, thiis morning, my son, Erik, and I meditated for about ten minutes.  My five year old frequently utters things to me that express wisdom for things he should know nothing about, and always at just the right time.  Just as we finished, he said:

“Did you know that when you say ’sun come out,’ the rain goes away and the love comes down. The sun shines down love on all its friends. But the sun gets confused sometimes, because it thinks the clouds are its friends. The clouds can be naughty… they have cloud guns and they shoot at the sun. But they’re just cloud bullets. They can’t hurt the sun. The sun just burns them up.”

So, the next time you feel disoriented, alienated, and disturbed by the behavior of a close friend or loved one, say “sun come out,” and let your light shine through their clouds.

A few weeks ago, something I wanted for a long time finally happened, but it quickly turned unpleasant.  I knew something wasn’t right, but I ignored the feeling, accepting this intuition as a sign that I was simply perceiving that nothing is perfect.  I twisted myself into various shapes in order to make it happen, making myself believe I wanted things in a way that really didn’t suit me with the part of me that knew I deserved better keeping quiet. 

I opened up and poured out without caring how it might impact my well being.  That night, I dreamed that I was trying to pour water into a cup full of old, stagnant water, and when I asked how to get the old water out of the cup, a character in my dream said, “You must become angry if you are to reclaim your well being.“  At the time I thought, “My well being is just fine, thank you very much,” and although I made many efforts to follow the instructions, I didn’t really understand the warning until I lost my well being over the days that followed as I learned that what seemed beautiful to me was soon perceived as a wrong against someone else.  It was just a stepping stone to get someone out of their relationship rut.

I conjured up all of my strategies for coping with emotional pain, carefully honed, powerful practices gathered over a lifetime spent contemplating the nature of mind and emotion, practices and techniques that have made me virtually immune to intolerable pain for more than a decade.  Nothing was working.  All I could do was sit with the pain (or, more accurately, flail around with it and pray for help).  All the while, I kept my heart open and maintained an attitude of understanding, forgiveness, tenderness, and personal responsibility.  “I don’t understand why you don’t think I’m the one who should be sorry,” he said, when my distress reached a peak. That’s when I realized that the only strategy that would work was the one quite clearly expressed to me in my dream. 

Becoming angry has always been difficult for me.  It conflicts with my sense of morality.  I am touched to the core by the story of Jesus turning the other cheek, by the story of the silver candlesticks in Les Miserables, when the wealthy bishop tells the escaped criminal that the silver he stole from him is his gift to the criminal, to buy his soul and give it back to God.  In my mind, anger goes against this mindset and represents a form of violence.

And yet, during the past few weeks, I’ve been bombarded with invitations to learn something called “nonviolent communication,” or NVC, a method of expressing discontent (and perhaps anger) in a way that maintains compassion and connection.  One friend sent me a flyer for an NVC weekend seminar called the “Giraffe Retreat,” which was a coincidence in itself (given that my subconscious chose the giraffe to represent certain interpersonal experiences associated with the above event).  I was also made aware of an upcoming NVC class on campus, then another friend brought it up out of the blue, and finally I saw a flyer in a cafe today. 

It seems that the universe has decided it’s time I learned how to become angry, compassionately… or else.  No other way out of this one. 

My attempt to become angry began quite clumsily with letter writing (of the sort you never send) and efforts to get in touch with my inner grizzly bear (assigned to me once by a local shaman, for reasons that are becoming more clear).  I am fumbling around with what it means to become angry, wondering what I’m really supposed to be angry about, contemplating the fundamental energy of anger, and trying to imagine a positive outcome.  Over the past few days, after hours of intense meditation and healing sessions with dear friends, I had an insight…

I have a habit of allowing people to hurt me, a habit carried out in the name of kindness.  Quite simply, when people step on me, I do not say “ouch.”  I bite my tongue and forgive, often without even moving my foot.  I don’t complain.  I just go along with it, as if I don’t deserve any better.  So many memories have surfaced, moments in which someone wanted something from me, and I gave without protest despite the fact that it caused me pain.  Truly, I’ve known so many people in my life who felt a right to what they wanted, and if I said “ouch,” they were just irritated and disgusted with me.  Perhaps I never said “ouch,” because I was afraid of losing my connection with that person.  “Ouch” makes people turn away.  Well, that gets to the heart of the matter. 

It seems, however, that if someone truly values you’re well being, saying “ouch” will draw them closer.  Clearly I have much to learn in this domain.  I think I will begin with NVC.  Wish me luck!

The feeling of disconnection, being cut off from someone who matters to you, it’s excruciating.  I had it in my head, the intense, overpowering perception that a link has been severed, like losing a part of your body.  Reaching a crescendo, it occurred to me that what it is I feel disconnected from is not exactly a person but a mental representation of them.  In other words, the scenario of disconnection is a simulation in my mind.  Regardless of the external circumstances, to feel disconnection, one must imagine a figure from which one stands apart.  Without this imagery, when there is no imagery at all, disconnection is meaningless.  What am I really without?  What have I actually lost?  The answer only arises in a state of inner silence and stillness when concepts dissolve and the window of perception is cleared. 

I don’t know if it was a hang over or what, but I woke up in the middle of the night on Saturday night, after my housewarming party, and I felt as if I was simultaneously in some sort of acid nightmare hell and completely encompassed by the most powerful, omniscient, palpable love imaginable. The thought came into my mind, “I’m in God’s stomach” and felt utterly true.  Stuff I thought was long buried and healed is surfacing again, which makes me feel as though I’ve profoundly failed. I’m not really sure where it’s leading. Sometimes I trust and sometimes I’m scared.

My 5 year old son Erik went into another one of his monologues again, cupping my cheek and holding my hand, speaking slowly and deliberately and looking into my eyes, he said:

“There’s a small tube that goes to your heart, and it’s invisible, and when your heart breaks, it goes into the tube. Every time your heart breaks, the pieces go right back together. [He repeats that slowly with gestures for emphasis.] The small tube is from the Indians, but now there’s a larger tube, and love goes into this tube, up, and out your mouth. Every time you breath, you breath in love. We’re surrounded by love. We all breath love. Did you know that? The whole planet is covered in love.” Then he said something about the whole body consisting of love, love on your skin, love even on the ends of your hairs.

Twice today, I opened a book to a random page to a paragraph on our shifting identity and the illusion of our separation.  The first time occurred at home with one of my own books, and the second occurred at a friends house with a book on her coffee table.  Here are the quotes:

From The Way of Liberation, by Alan Watts:

“We, each one of us, are not a substantial entity, we are like a flame.  A flame is a stream of hot gas, like a whirlpool in a river, it is always moving, always changing, and yet it always appears the same.  Each one of us is a flowing, and if you resist it, you go crazy.  You are like somebody trying to grab water in his hands–the harder you squeeze it, the faster it slips through your fingers.  So, the principle of the enjoyment of life is–and this is not a precept, this is not a moralization, this has nothing to do with what you ought, should, et cetera, it is completely practical–do not hang onto it–let it go.”

From My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientists Personal Journey, by Jill Bolte Taylor:

“My entire self-concept shifted as I no longer perceived myself as a single, a solid, an entity with boundaries that separated me from the entities around me.  I understood that at the most elementary level, I am a fluid.  Of course I am a fluid!  Everything around us, about us, among us, within us, and between us is made up of atoms and molecules vibrating in space.  Although the ego center of our language center prefers defining our self as individual and solid, most of us are aware that we are made up of trillions of cells, gallons of water, and ultimately everything about us exists in a constant state of activity.  My left hemisphere had been trained to perceive myself as a solid, separate from others.  Now, released from that restrictive circuitry, my right hemisphere relished in its attachment to the eternal flow.  I was no longer isolated and alone.  My soul was as big as the universe and frolicked with glee in a boundless sea.”

In the practice of samadhi, one eventually enters a state of silence and stillness characterized by an ineffable, almost inexplicable luminosity that gives birth to overwhelming love.  Silence is the doorway, although applying a metaphor to such a state is fundamentally misleading, because such silence is precisely what you achieve when you look past all metaphor.

In my own practice, I’ve found ways of entering into this silence very rapidly.  These are the steps I follow:

1. Become aware of the body in the present moment, the space around the body, all sensations and tension.
2. Completely relax the body until even faint impulses or tendencies to move are eliminated.  Imagine tension and inclinations towards tension are draining out of the body.  This step is extremely important due to the role of the body in conceptual thought.
3. Diminish your internal verbal monologue (e.g., “blah blah blah”) by following the breath or reciting a mantra (i.e., preoccupying the verbal faculties).
4. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, recognize the essential and profound difference between what is and what is not.  I elaborate below.

What Is vs. What is Not

In recognizing the difference between what is and what is not, see that the vast majority of what you believe IS is actually a dream in your mind.  What you see as your current life situation is, in this very moment as you sit in your chair, a fabricated reality in your head.  What you see as your lot in life is, in this moment right now and right here, a formation of your own thoughts and sensory memories. 

No matter how you frame things, these thought formations are not what is.  What IS is thought formation itself.  In other words, what IS is you sitting in a chair having thoughts and letting them go.  And so, you see past them quite naturally by seeing them as they are, knowing at a gut level that your thought formations are just dreams (in the literal sense), and these dreams are not real (and again, I mean that literally).  In this way, the dream becomes lucid.  You see through reality, the dream naturally ceases, and there is silence.

Thinking of Silence

Silence when seen as a goal creates a mental image of a path towards a desired object and a feeling that you must exert effort along this path to reach or generate the goal object.  I have had little success generating a state of silence from that mindset. 

Instead, think of silence as the ground, the underlying natural state, upon which you will rest when you become aware of what is as it is, when you recognize that what you see as life or your life circumstance is, for the most part, your waking dream.  This dream was prompted by external sensory input, so the point is not that the dream is false or has no outside reference.  The point is not that nothing exists.  Rather, the point is that what does in fact exist right here and right now is not the same as your dream of what exists (back then, in the future, over there).  Even if your waking dream points to something “out there,” you must still recognize it as a waking dream.  It’s “accuracy” is irrelevant.

Recently, in a lucid dream, I spoke to a character in my dream with the knowledge that their appearance was actually composed of nothing more than my own mind. I looked all around me and recognized everything as mind stuff.  I could thus communicate with the deeper aspects of my mind by gazing at my surroundings and talking to the objects in my dream with that awareness.

Imagine that waking life is precisely the same, a dream, but the dreamer is the universal mind.  I went to a park and found a creek, sat on the rocks under tall trees, and watched the water trickle over the rocks.  I looked around and felt as though everything I was seeing was an object in a dream.  I could communicate with the universal mind by gazing at my surroundings and talking to the rocks and trees with that awareness.  Suddenly, I felt a presence open up, as if my waking life had become lucid. 

Warmth.  Being.  Uninterrupted continuous wholeness.  Nothing is connected because there aren’t any parts to be joined up; everything is the same one thing.  I wanted to say, as in a game of hide and seek, “I figured you out!  Found you!”

I think my athiesm during my twenties was a period of alienation from nature, as if nature were a facade with nothing behind it, which is precisely what I went through with people, and now that is healed.  Everything is back, or rather I’m seeing things again.  Really hard to feel alone at this point.

During the past few months, I had repeated lucid dreams in which I seemed to relive an experience of drowning in a river in every excruciating detail.  I’ve always had nightmares of drowning in dark, black water for as long as I can remember, but these were different, and they increased in frequency just recently.   

In a lucid dream in June, I was lying in a dry river bed, and I thought to myself, “I once drowned here,” and I experienced the entire thing with all the intense pain.  Immediately afterwards, I found dozens of Cinderella shoes lining the river, signifying my dual roles in life as parent and prospective romantic partner.  During another episode in July, I was mostly awake.  I simply began to relive that same experience in total detail, as if I were suddenly transported there.  It was traumatic.  I felt as though I’d been brutally thrust into the situation, perhaps by falling in from a height.  Difficult to describe.   

Throughout these dreams, I always had the sense that I’d been abruptly alienated from someone close to me just prior to drowning.  What was once a warm face filled with presence became an empty shell to me, as if a deep connection with someone had been called into question, and I’d thrown myself into the river in despair.

River Healing

Then finally, on August 8, I went on a canoe trip with a group from school.  That morning, I was meditating and experienced a hypnogogic image in which my mala was descending into a pool of clear, shining water.  I also saw an image of a low flying plane above a river.  I was standing on a platform looking down at the water.

I packed my things and drove to Sauk City where I met the group and boarded a canoe.  Every now and then, I would stop paddling and look out at the water and feel the loving energy of the water, the trees, the sky, coursing through me.  We stopped along the way to swim and hike up to the top of a cliff.  My knees shook at first, but eventually I stood at the edge and looked out, unafraid.  My canoeing partner helped me to remember the lines of the very first song I remember hearing in life, Blackwater, by the Doobie Brothers.  Several low flying planes buzzed overhead.  I ended the trip reclined in my canoe, my arms across my chest, feeling completely connected to the water, looking up at a dozen warm faces and sunlight, feeling as though I were being washed ashore in a funeral pyre and born anew.

My healing river experience left me with a renewed sense of connection to people I care about. 

Pouring Love

That night, I had another lucid dream about water and love.  In the dream, I held a cup of water containing a butterfly and a clover flower, quite beautiful.  However, despite it’s beauty, it was also old (stagnant, frozen in time) and needed to be refreshed.  I went to a fountain and attempted to pour new water in the cup, but of course the new water simply flowed over the sides, because the old water was still in the cup. 

I tried to pour the old water out of the cup, but it wouldn’t come out.  The water hovered inside the cup, defying gravity, while I twisted and turned the cup around it in the air.  Finally, being quite lucid, I said, “Okay universe, how do I get the old water out of the cup?”  My mom appeared in my dream and said, “You must become angry in order to reclaim your wellbeing.” 

The fundamental energy of anger is sometimes necessary to move that which needs to be moved.  Anger in its most basic form is simply a force that acts upon objects with the intention of configuring them in a new way. 

In line with this dream, on the day before my canoe trip, I spent several hours scooping old water out of a children’s pool in my backyard.  After only a couple of days, the water had turned into a green pond!  The water wouldn’t drain out of the bottom for some reasons, so I used a bucket.  My five year old kept turning on the hose and trying to add new water to the pool, and each time, I screamed, “Nooo!!!!!  We can’t add any new water until the old water is out.” 

I had recently begun using the metaphor of pouring love onto others.  I realize now that I’ve poured buckets of love on people many times and watched the water love spill over the edges unreceived.  Perhaps anger is the energy necessary to stop myself from continuing to pour when I know the new water is not filling the container? 

Whatever the take-home message, I feel a stronger sense of well being and connection than I have ever felt in my life.

Love and blessings!