No place to hide in the empty room

“Meditation is the practice of meeting whatever comes to us with equanimity and openness.
If the Western ideal is "tough on the outside, soft on the inside," the Eastern approach
is to become soft on the outside and tough on the inside. We can soften and open to others because we have the discipline to bring ourselves back into balance. We can do this because we have some measure of trust in our own and others' basic goodness,” says Susan Piver in How not to be afraid of your own life.

I said on Saturday that I feared my own meditation practice. I ended up not sitting that night. I was feeling numb after the passage of something so beautiful from my life, and I wanted to stay that way. I didn’t want to feel. I didn’t want to open to my emotions. I was tired of it. Sick and tired of it. I was tired of tears. Weary of feeling the hopelessness that comes with them.

Meditation is a portal through which one walks into a room of silence, and space, where there is no place to hide from all that we are, have been, and can be.

On Sunday morning I sat for 20 minutes. I was surprised when my session was through, in part because I usually sit for longer, and in part because I had managed to hold my mind largely empty of images, memories, stories and projections of the future. I felt pretty clean. Clear.

I was still numb.

This morning I cracked the well of tears. The sense of loss rose up from the emptiness and instead of pushing it away, I greeted it, and invited it in. Sooner or later you’ve got to sit down for tea with all of this shit, and it may as well be sooner, I thought. Its not so much the loss even, as the uncertainty. I fear the long wait ahead, wondering if what was glimpsed so briefly might yet become. At the centre of that waiting are desperate vulnerabilities, born of memory and longing, desire and guilt, insecurity, fear and shame, and the myriad stories that my mind can construct about how life will play out over the months to come.

I felt that pain, and in the darkness of my room, let the sorrow empty me. I sat for a while, a carving of the Buddha doubled over in grief in my hands, my fingers on the groove of his spine, which I am told is to be rubbed during times of sorrow.

Sitting with that sadness, I let it pass.

As my meditation ended, I read the set of sutras from Deepak Chopra’s book The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire, which has become part of my daily practice. Of course, today’s sutra was Moksha, I am emotionally free.

Whatever.

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

More tears.

“Imagine that you are free from blaming, free from feeling blame and guilt.”

Tears. Sigh. Getting bored of tears. Dumbness would be nice right about now.

“Imagine that you can choose any emotional feeling you want to experience.”

I stopped there. What would I choose? Easy: bliss. The cold fire that sweeps through me and out of me when I am feeling a part of everything and everybody, my body not a vessel to contain my life, but a reference point for the centralization of energy and love and creativity that is me.

And happiness.

And love.

I allowed myself in that moment to miss what I had lost, to say to the universe how much I missed and longed for what had passed, and to acknowledge that I wanted it back in my life. For there to be any chance of that happening, I have to let go completely.