A place with no preferences

 Tricycle Magazine is a Buddhist magazine with an excellent, interactive website.  In their book club section they are currently hosting a discussion of Toni Bernhard's book 'How to be Sick'.  Pop on over to read excerpts from Toni's book and participate in a very interesting discussion with her.

Yesterday Toni asked, 'Do others think it's possible to come to a place where it's "okay" to be sick -- where we would have "no preferences" (to quote the third Zen patriarch) as to whether we were sick or healthy?'

An interesting question! 

I'm not sure about whether I could come to a place where it's OK to be sick (or, to be more specific, a place with no preferences). I think it's possible, but it's not what I've experienced yet.

What I'm investigating at the moment is whether I can come to a place where I don't have a preference about whether I feel it's OK or not OK to be sick.

Here's what I'm exploring...

If I have a day when I feel miserable, bitter, and very ungrateful about being sick...should I feel a preference that this day not be that way? Should I feel a preference that I feel at ease and peaceful being sick? Or should I have no preferences ?

For me, this exploration is very rich. I'm suddenly allowing all these really difficult feelings to flow through my body - boredom, frustration, anxiety about the future, terror, emptiness, and despair. I know this all sounds really miserable, and not like 'good news' at all, but I have this strong feeling that allowing these feelings to flow is really my path.

At the moment I'm feelings in the depths of despair becuase I am just sitting in the 'soup of my suffering' and experiencing a great helplessness. I'm experiencing what it's like to stop the fight and just allow whatever is happening to happen. This is why I haven't posted on this blog for a while, because I've been feeling an almost crushing sense of despair and depression.

Whilst this feels terrible at the moment somewhere deep inside I know that I just have to keep going. Although my mind tells me that acceptance will lead to an eternal, never-ending despair, I have read enough Buddhist books to have at least an intellectual understanding that I really just have to keep going.

So today, I think my practice will be to lie in bed and not have a preference that I feel one way over another way.

Metta to all on this very difficult journey (called life).

Gili Air - a tiny island just off the coast of Lombok.

Hope Begins in the Dark

Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: You don't give up. 

Anne Lamott

I read this quote yesterday and smiled grimly to myself, because it pretty much pins down how I'm feeling at the moment. If I had to draw a picture of how I feel there'd be a cartoon character hanging by one fingernail to the side of a cliff while a bunch of coyotes waited at the bottom (with a few buzzards circling in the sky too - just for good measure).

OK, a bit dramatic - and I'm not so sure buzzards can even fly - but I'm sure you get my drift.  I'm just hanging in there; stubbornly hoping, and not giving up.

This meditation caper aint easy!  True, there are occasional moments of insight and peace, but I'm spending an awful lot of time just feeling pain, feeling distress, feeling despair, feeling hopelesness. Just to make life a little bit harder for myself I'm also feeling that if I was a better meditator, if I just 'got this', then I wouldn't be feeling all this...this...CRAP!

So, it's good to come across quotes like the one above.  I just hope my stubborness will see me through. 'One more breath, just one more breath...'

  

An hour later... 

Well! Waddaya know?!  Buzzards can fly  - and here's one doing it...

Source: Wikipedia Commons