Dreaming Freedom

I’ve started a daily practice of meditation. I’ve been thinking about doing this for some time, but never felt as though I knew what meditation really was. I still don’t: I’ve just decided to stop letting that get in the way.

I sit for half an hour in the morning, and sometimes, If I’m not too tired, or haven’t had too much booze, I sit again in the evening. I get up early so I can do this before Rio and Silas wake. I follow each session with a reading from Deepak Chopra’s book “The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire.” There are seven principles towards the conclusion of the book that are intended to be guides towards the attainment of what he calls syncrodestiny, which I interpret to be a place of lasting peace, where we become interwoven with the fabric of the universe and are able to harness that unlimited sense of connectivity, creativity and infinite coincidence to bring anything we want into our lives: love, abundance, bliss.

This morning’s meditation session was turbulent. Ok, they are all pretty turbulent, so far. In the thirty minutes I sit, I find that for about ten minutes I am fantasising, for ten minutes I’m replaying old fears and failures, and for about ten minutes I’m labouring towards what Chopra calls “the gap” between thoughts, where we can glimpse our own soul. I don’t think I’ve even gotten a peak at my soul yet. There were some dancing lights the other day, and I have experienced the feeling I describe as bliss a couple of times. I’ve also fallen asleep once or twice.

During my sit this morning I was startled to hear, as clear as a bell, a voice yelling “no!” inside my head. I think it was my own voice. I observed this, as I’ve been taught, and then stepped past it to try and slip into the gap again. But with the voice came a flood of images of my children, and the tidal wave of fear I harbour about loosing them as Kathleen and I move deeper into our separation, and as she welcomes a new (and very wonderful) man into her life, and the home she shares with our kids.

I was deeply relieved when the buzzer went off in the kitchen, and I could open my eyes and pick up Chopra’s book to read that day’s principle. It was a simple statement: Moksha, I am emotionally free.

See what I mean about infinite coincidence?

As I got to the sutra statements for this principle I sat down in the tiny sunroom on the front of my Fernwood home and sipped a cup of tea. The first statement was:

Imagine that you are without physical form, a field of awareness everywhere at all times.

That was easy enough. Then:

Imagine that you have left behind forever any sense of anger or resentment.

Reading that passage I burst into tears.

For most of my life I have been coiled in anger. Its source isn’t yet known to me, but the pain of it has plagued me since high school, or earlier. Imagining that I had left it behind forever was so liberating! I closed my eyes and thought about how good it will feel to have shed its clutching skin like a snake, and then let that feeling pulse through my body, and out into the wider world.

Its not an easy path, this one towards emotional freedom. I find that I am constantly stubbing my toe on rocks and roots in the tangled darkness. But dreaming of this freedom, and imagining it becoming part of the fabric of my waking self, is light enough to find my way.