A Lighter Lightness

And then peace finds me.  Lightness finds me.  Not only that, but a lighter lightness than I have known for many, many weeks.  With easy smiling and inward laughing at my monkey mind.

I am reading and/or listening to a few different helpers at the moment.  By the bed I have A Course In Miracles; I do one lesson from the 365 assignments every few days. I’m on page 159 of Wherever You Go There You Are. My reading in that one is slowing considerably but I’m still with it.  When Thich Nhat Hanh’s slender volume The Miracle of Mindfulness came in the mail, I couldn’t wait to peek inside.  That one I have to stop myself from gobbling up too quickly.  In the car I am listening to Pema Chödrön’s Getting Unstuck CDs and at work after lunch I hide in the quieter upstairs lounge to read a chapter or two in The Mindful Way Through Depression. I’ll let you know if that one is helpful.

Of these materials, some appeal more to the intellect and some just transport me to the light place.

Today A Course in Miracles lesson for the day was reminding me that the world as I perceive it is my own creation. When my mind changes, my world will change. I know this to be true, but sometimes I forget and sometimes even though I know it, I still get stuck to my Shenpas like Brer Rabbit stuck to the tar baby. The more you struggle, the more stuck you get!

All the teachings I am reading carry that message: the more you try to figure out how you got stuck (or down or whatever) or try to FIX things, the worse you make it.  Ruminating does not help, it adds to the habituation, further carves the neural pathways that do NOT help get you back out.

The hardest part, especially for westerners, seems to be remembering our basic underlying Buddha nature. First in mindfulness practice we are told not to label thoughts good or bad, just watch them like ripples on water. Let them go. But we catch ourselves labeling urges and thoughts as good and bad and then we label the labeling as bad. Another layer of Shenpa. Ha!

I can’t seem to locate the door to the place I’ve spent all of today so I can come back here at will.  No, there is no magic formula (x hours of meditation plus 11 yoga poses plus 188 chants plus a vegan diet = magic door to enlightenment).  Don’t you wish.

Today I’m here in the light place and I don’t really know how I got here.

But I do know…and this is very encouraging to me…that it does happen from time to time.

And I know that I am learning some things.  The times of joy I am experiencing are not so tied to circumstance as, say, one year ago.  A year ago I might have said it was a good day because I had some time with my best friend drinking tea and talking or took myself to a movie and ended up in a spontaneous, warm conversation with a stranger in the ticket line.

These days it’s more about consciously choosing to find beauty around me in whatever happens, even on a day with no friends and no tea.

I can’t help but think it is good training, this time. And maybe a day like yesterday, as miserable as it felt at the time, was a blessing in disguise. It helped me understand some of the points these authors are trying to drive home. Not understand intellectually but “get” them experientially after tasting both in a 48-hour period: what it feels like to be stuck and what it feels like to be free.