Expanding and Contracting

While I’ve been feeling way more like the waves than the ocean recently, it was a lovely day yesterday, despite the feelings of anxiety, now subsided into low level background. My friend R wanted to meet at the allotment and we basked in the warm sunshine for 2 or 3 hours chatting and sitting. Then back here and my mum unusually agreed to meet out to the park and we sat for a couple of hours on a bench in the evening sun. It was lovely actually. She was more friendly, seems to have changed back to a softer approach.

It has only been in the recent part of my life that actual fully waking up has become a real possibility. From about 14 onwards I was a pretty serious spiritual seeker and happy to trot along the spiritual path and be busy with a gradual conscious evolution inside. I didn’t consider it remotely possible for me to wake up in this life. I thought that would be another life, probably 100s of lifetimes ahead. Some progress would be enough for this lifetime. At least I knew what I was going to do with my life, prepare.

I was happy to have found the path, and to be on an adventure, a romantic quest for the holy grail, never to be found but worth the process of looking for. Though I had my distractions, relationships, raising a child, university, starting a business etc, I was pretty serious and it wasn’t a casual path for me, my motto was ‘the truth at any price’. I eschewed most new agey type soft fluffy approaches and went for the serious stuff. In my teens it was in the library reading all sorts, theosophy, Gurdjieff, Castaneda, Tao te Ching. Dived into some therapy, went to meditation classes. Even joined a spiritual community for a few years in South Africa which turned out to be crazy. Then ended up with dzogchen, the upanishads, Eckhart Tolle.

The ‘seeker’ was very firmly embedded in my personality identity. It gave life purpose, momentum, a goal and meaning. It has been a big adjustment to give that up. It had become part of my personality structure. Who are you? “A seeker of truth!”

Then in the last 5 years for it to start dawning on me that just maybe, it might be possible for me. What what WHAT. Well it has been quite a shock to see that the very seeking I was engaged in was actually an impediment to just turning and facing the ‘as is’ and a ‘no me’. Hehe. It was a resistance to the truth anyway sort of, and the grand self improvement project was actually a maybe not so subtle self rejection, of basically ‘not good enough’.

To realise it’s all already here and there is nothing to look for, just a simple relaxing, opening up and surrendering. So stop.

That has been a horror to this ego. It loved the motion, the travelling, the discoveries, it collected the encouraging ‘aha!’ moments that got me through the scary bits. It lived for that. And it satisfied it’s restlessness which I didn’t have to face while ‘seeking’. Now over these last few years, it is utterly deflated and doesn’t know how to be with just this. Nothing to do, nowhere to go. What, no more romantic adventurous questing?! It knows it is doomed. And what a huge loss of face.

Well the agonies of it all are well documented here, as are some of the joys and the tools I have picked up which have helped.

That whole adventuring gave such a buzz of excitement of life that kept me going even extending to mundane things like running a business. And now everything has become a bit lack lustre.

All except being out in nature, which has since a child and teen I sought out to become one with. Where I seem to disappear completely and happily know ‘me’ as a blade of grass, not only that I can feel it moving in my body as a physical sensation. I feel the river moving in the body. The darting bird. It’s all in my body out there. And the body has become enormous and all of it is inside. I have few if any thoughts, certainly anything self referential would barely occur. Just being, seeing, feeling, sensing. Is enough.

And so I spend hours by the river and don’t do hardly any work. How that story goes I have no idea. I get stressed thinking about it. What to do about business, how little I do, the worry of the future of the consequences of that. And then I go back to the woods and the river where it is all big and expansive and perfect again.