Hanging out in Clear Deep Heart/Mind…

Tags

Big Things, Clear Deep Heart/Mind, Essence Nature, flooding, hail, Healesville, koan, Melbourne, Motorbikes, non-conceptual meditation, Queenstown, Retreat, storms, Zen

Somewhere near Queenstown, New Zealand August 2004

Things are shifting rapidly for me once again. Or they are not.

I’m back from retreat of course, got back on Monday night and apparently missed a huge weekend of outrageously extreme storms here in Melbourne. So extreme that a friend in Sydney sent me a text to ask if I was okay. We’re talking massive floods only a ten minute cycle from my home, hail stones the size of your fist, thunder and lightning! You can check out some photos at this link…

Out in Healesville, we had storms but nothing severe and when I got home there was no damage to report.

I desperately need some time to sit down and write, but there’s not gonna be a lot of spare time til the weekend I suspect. And even then, I’ll have some house guests – one of my best friends is arriving Friday night (in his 4WD with motorbikes on the trailer!) and two of his friends will be staying for a couple of nights, arriving late Saturday night. I’ll need to shop and make sure everything is clean and comfortable etc… and then hopefully there’ll be time to put a little more of my recent adventures into words.

For now I’m just hanging out in Clear Deep Heart/Mind and chuckling at myself and recent revelations. My friend who made it possible for me to go on this three day Zen retreat? I owe him A LOT! I just thought I was going to a beautiful location to meditate and do yoga. I had no idea what else was gonna happen! For now, let me just say it falls under the heading of Big Things.

But it’s all a bit like that right now. I think I started to catch on last year and now, here I am… some of the stuff I’ve learned with my Guru over the past seven years is starting to come home in a big way. In part, that’s due to last year’s hard work and then my recent encounters with other wonderful yoga/meditation teachers who’ve reflected and magnified certain key points for me.

You could say there’s been a lot of Ah-Ha’s going on here and I suspect I haven’t seen the last of them.

As a bit of a teaser, here’s a few observations that’ll point you to where I’m at (kinda):

• Sitting for non-conceptual meditation is one of the best and worst things in the world
• If you do this for any length of time, everything hurts but never for the reasons you think it does
• Just when you tell yourself “I’m so freakin’ screwed”, the bell rings and the world shifts all over again
• The human condition of suffering, which is caused by our fight-or-flight reaction, wants us to turn away from pain of any kind whenever we can
• Learning not to run from pain is desperately challenging but rewarding
• Anger needs to be separated out in the mind from violent actions, thoughts and deeds against ourself or others – it shouldn’t be equated with violence because anger is a feeling, where violence is a response
• Every single one of us can be an asshole (to ourselves and/or others) every day of the week if we don’t make this distinction for ourselves
• Not being an asshole affords a capacity to laugh at ourself and fills the heart with boundless compassion
• Awakenings to our true Essence Nature are closer than we can imagine – and there are many to be had!
• You can never do enough yoga!

And finally a Zen koan: Nothing is as it seems, nor is it otherwise…

There’s so much more to say, but for now that’s gonna have to do. Because there’s so much re-stacking going on, and the above-mentioned busy-ness. And I really need to find a way to explain myself better than a handful of cryptic bullet points. 😉

~Svasti