Real meditation id not a 'spiritual by-pass.' It does not by-pass our pain. Meditation penetrates into the nectar of pain. Meditators don't rise above pain, they surrender to its core. At the center of pain is the flowering of boundless energy. The same sap pervades both rose and thorn. The rose is happiness, the thorn is sorrow, the sap is bliss. Ananda isn't a passing mood or a temporary emotional state. Ananda is the juice of pure existence. It glows in the dark. Transcendence is not above, it is the hollow in the seed.
Even in a time of quiet, our solitude ferments into upheavals of rage and despair. One student said, "I can't wait to get to the other side of this anger!" But when we try to wrestle down our anger with our mind, we only churn up more wrathful thoughts and images from the past, or from the froth of the media. Mind, through mind, will never get to the other side of anger.
My teacher once said, "Blessed are you when you are confused, for then your mind descends into the heart."
In such moments of turmoil, I like to practice a sabbath from mental images. Anchored by the breath, I can sink into the space of the heart, and welcome the sacred alchemy of the body. The body brings salvation from the mind.
Embrace anger as pure sensation in the forehead. Embrace grief as the awakening of the gut, which is also the root of laughter. Embrace fear as a contraction in the chest, throbbing with energy.
When we embrace these emotions as energy, without attaching them to images of the past, without naming them in the mind, we give that energy a chance to transform itself. We give it freedom to blossom into fresh electricity in our cells, new electrons of flesh. This is what anger really is: creative energy contracted and solidified.
Use the gift of this body to let anger settle and dissolve into its deeper primordial condition: fear. But don't stop there. Feel the taste of the fear, and it too will transmute into something even more primal: our weariness, our weariness with trying to be in control.
The safe space of our own body is our temple of alchemy, and here its perfectly OK to be out of control. It's OK to explore sensations of intense emotion as sensation, not thought. We don't have to name the sensations. They are roots and hollows leading down into the Groundless at the heart of creation, where fountains of living water gush out of the well in our humanity.
My anger, my fear, my weariness, are not to be denied. For they are pathways that lead to a blossoming deeper inside me than I. They are portals leading from 'I' to Am.
To my soul, this may ache like a dark night. But to my body, it is the mystery of Spring in a tender furrow. What is a furrow? A space between. A space that is nameless and not yet, not yet... This where the action is. This is where the alchemy is.
A bee falls into the ocean of nectar at the center of the rose. But it does not die. It comes forth laden with gifts.
Photo by Kristy Thompson
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