However connectedness to the great unity comes about, it is really important to take note that something unique has happened. This suggests the importance of an on-going awareness of what is happening within our mind and body, undistracted by incessant thinking. Some form of contemplative practice is the only way I know of maintaining mindfulness. I once listened to a tape by a English meditation teacher Christopher Titmuss who said that awakenings happen routinely in people’s lives, but they are so preoccupied with the busyness of outer living that these experiences–if noticed–are not fully unpacked and reflected on. And therefore the liberating power of the awakening mind is not fully integrated into our conscious living.
Reflection is not so much a “thinking about,” as when you analyze, dissect subject an idea or experience to a taking apart process. I like to keep what I’m reflecting on in its wholeness. Rather I will “think on” by wondering, asking myself or my higher guidance questions and seeing what comes back.
Reflecting in this way can bring amazing revelations that help to bring the separate pieces of our lives into a wholeness. Here’s two very different experiences in my life that mirror one another. I was able to appreciate the symmetry upon reflection after the second one happened at a Vipassana meditation retreat in 1997. The first occurred when was a child at a time I had been having terrible nightmares over a period of years.
Inner Sanctum
North Andover, Mass.
Circa 1948-1951
In this dream, I’m in a small town, like in the old west, with two and three story wooden buildings. I am supposed to meet my family. I see a hotel and go inside and am received by a woman who tells me my room is on the second floor.
Upon going up to the second floor, I find my room and have a sense of foreboding. After settling in, I open my door and feel a strange pull to go to the left, to the end of the long, narrow hallway. I walk to the end where there is a door. I open the door and my fear is mounting. The room is dimly lit and has nothing in it except a small round table draped in a red cloth, the kind mediums use to hold their crystal ball. The room is hung with thick red, velvet cloth and the light is a low and filtered, giving the room a blood-red cast. I feel something evil in the room, but can see nothing. The evil presence seems to penetrate me and my terror becomes inconceivable. My whole body breaks up and atomizes into millions of tiny particles.
And then the experience on my meditation retreat:
Bunga
Ethel, Wa.
March, 1997
Day two of my first, 10-day Vipassana meditation course is not quite hell, but getting close. An obsession about not being able to sit without pain and looking bad or disturbing other meditators grips me in a press of anxiety that won’t let go. I go into day three having struggled with only a few hours of sleep and worrying that my exhaustion would undo me, or, worse, send me home defeated.
A visit with the course teacher serves only slightly to lessen my fear, my life-long companion since being shut in the closet as an infant, chased by witches in my childhood dreams and dogged by intimidating people who bullied their way through business while I was trying to be polite. “This is your particular sankara,” the teacher says, referring to the Pali word which we translate as complex, or habit pattern of the mind. No great revelation here. I had known for years that fear loomed as the main villain in my inner world. But somehow to have my fear addressed as “sankara” gives the spin doctors in my brain some measure of control in this otherwise new and unsettling environment of twelve-hour meditation days and noble silence.
Day four seemed a miracle as I awoke from my first good sleep anxiety-free and with a fresh calm. I was ready to begin the shift from anapana (breath-meditation) to vipassana meditation when we would focus on sensations up and down the body. Instead of the subtle sensations I had expected, I feel a pulsing wherever I focused. Later this turns into a throb like someone is palpating my body wherever I place my attention.
As I go to bed that night, the throbbing increases as does my concern that this meditation may be getting out of control. But refreshed from the day, I am curious and adventuresome and decide to let the process go forward. It seems to have a wisdom of its own. Two hours pass as I am lying still, hands at my sides scanning my body and noticing a rush of tiny sensations flowing out from each throb. Head to feet, feet to head for more hours until I notice a strange energy break as the throbbing stops and blends into a cascade of the tiny, subtle vibrations all over my body.
My out-breath sends a wave of vibrations down my body, and my in-breath brings a wave back from toe to head. I am encased in an energy envelope and have lost the distinct outlines of my body as my awareness merges with a larger energy field surrounding me.
It was only after the course that I learn this experience has a Pali name, bunga, meaning dissolution. Then, for the first time, I reflect on the similarity between this disolving of my body and the childhood nightmare in which fear so penetrated me that I atomize into tiny pieces.
Then it felt like death. Now dissolution seems like life. Was the first darker prophecy calling for its lighter twin?
It wasn’t until well after this retreat that I wrote down this and many other awakenings in a journal I call Inside Stories. Seeing the parallels between the ecstatic dissolution during the vipassana retreat compared to the nightmare gave me additional evidence of the beautiful wisdom in life that our deepest wounds are springboards for our liberation. You see the terror I had experienced as a child–of being left in a closet because my mother couldn’t stand to hear me cry–had created a node of intense psychic force which not only had been crippling in many areas of my life, but had also become a lightning rod for my meditation. That space of fear is really a gift, for it was the portal through which I was and still am able to transit into a greater spaciousness.
Knowing this has helped me to embrace the difficult and painful experiences in my life with greater peace of mind and compassion. In fact, I have learned to let go more deeply, say “Thank you” to the reversals and losses, knowing all things are working together for our awakening and ultimate freedom–if we will only have the understanding that this is so.
Filed under: Personal Sharing, The Path, Waking Up Moments
