A Meditation on Busyness & the Inner Life
This week I will be facilitating a bi-monthly Social Justice Activist Meditation gathering in Austin, Texas on busyness and its affects on the inner life. Today I began preparing for this by taking some time to sit, silent with my eyes closed on my living room couch. I began by speaking out loud the Sufi invocation:
Towards the One
the perfection of Love, Harmony and Beauty
the only being,
united with all the illuminated souls
who form the embodiment of the Eternal
The Spirit of Guidance.
Then I did a breath practice. I sat quietly and turned my attention to the recesses of my body and listened for my heartbeat. With its slightly sped up thumping found, I placed my hands, as my teachers had carefully proscribed with my right hand cupped under my chin and my pointer finger covering my right nostril; my other hand gently holding the other in place. I breathed in through my right for four counts as if following the beats of a flesh buried metronome and then placed both fingers against my nostrils. Holding my breath. My tongue finds the roof of my mouth and my eyes gently falling back as if resting on satin pillows. I am held there for 8 seconds and then let the air pour through my right nostril as if water spilling from a pitcher of water. I go on to repeat this pattern three more times and then switch its direction and inhale through the right nostril. Hold. And allow the breath to cascade out of the left nostril.
I have read that the nervous system responds to the gentle holding of the breath as a sign of safety. A way to assure the shivering animal part of ourselves that, we are oh-so –NOT-in-danger and decidedly DO NOT need to run from trouble. It’s as if the slow, held breath is saying, “LOOK AT THIS! We can easily afford to even hold our breath!” As Julian of Norwich, the 14th Century Christian mystic, would say, it is the breath of All is Well, All Shall by Well, And all manner of things shall be well.
After the breath practice I spend five minutes concentrating on my belly center. It is a practice that is usually quite difficult as the mind undoubtedly wants to run screaming from such a strait jacket of focus or plays with you by getting too deep into the task with judgment that can lead to a sort of imaginary lunacy. But maturing my ability to apply and hold my awareness with care has affected my ability to maneuver through my life with greater tolerance — both for myself and others.
I move onto 10 minutes of open awareness. This is where I can drop the concentration and travel into a state of spaciousness — where I can let go of the reins of mental operations as best as I can and find a more subtle energy wave to ride. I usually find myself being concentrated and then sort of ‘clicked into’ a state of awareness about an inch below my third eye and located about three inches away my physical eyes. It feels as if I am released from being located so tightly to my small self and am able to be contactable to a whole different plane of experience. I actually have the sensation of being “put into” another set of eyes. And there I sit for the remaining minutes.
Still.
At some point I feel the desire to move. To get some of my to-do list done. To be done. It has the same kind of feeling as when I try to hug my four your old son for too long and he squirms away; shrieking and laughing. The ego wants to do, to mold, to create, rearrange, stomp on things and get shit figured out…perceive its own affect and make something happen god damned it! And in the moment of what feels like Life itself moving through me with the most basic need to act, I sense for about an 1/8 of a nanosecond the profound absurdity of the seemingly insatiable desire to move away from the present, the Eternal — the One to Whom We Belong. As though in that desire we are desiring more than God Herself. That being still and held, that state of union, is simultaneously our heart’s deepest desire and what our limited, individuated human self cannot tolerate.
But the ultimate craziness of this life of ours is the sanctity of both — if we are able to attune to the sacred that is undifferentiated in both the Eternal silence and the quiet frenzy of ‘doing’ our to-do list. All ultimately falls within the activity of praise in this life and when we bring our full awareness to that holy paradox we are able to walk within the world and fulfill each of our inherent and deepest desire to live our lives as beloved friend’s of God.
