USE YOUR WORDS
“I want to create a luminous mind. We spend so much time identifying with the busy mind, the monkey mind, the restless mind, all the names we label it with. We focus on the limitations, rather than the potential. We try to control it, overcome the negative tendencies, but what if we let the light in? What if we recognized our minds as light?” (Swami Radhananda Living the Practice 2010)
For close to three months I’ve been swimming every day in a pool, ocean or lake. Never alone, at least not without someone spotting me, and, except for in a pool, I tether a neon green inflatable “swim buddy” around my waist that has, on one occasion, been a lifesaver. A couple of Fridays ago I was swimming (alone but watched from shore) in Whistler’s glacier-fed (aka COLD) Green Lake, when the wind whipped a big glug of water into my mouth, leaving me choking and coughing and panicking for fear of taking in more water. Grabbing my swim buddy, I hauled my torso onto it and floated there until my hacking subsided and I could calm my breathing — and my nerves — enough to finish the swim. I was there long enough that my family, watching from the dock, had fired up the motor boat, preparing to come to my rescue if necessary. Thankfully, it wasn’t.
Fast forward to today, and a blog in which I struggle to distill what Trungpa is saying in his Shambhala philosophy, into more commonplace speech. In order to better understand his “wind horse” and “drala” (really too confusing) I bounce between Swami Radhananda’s “sky like mind” and Michael Singer’s “maniacal inner roommate”, from whom I can’t seem to get away. All of this in aid of finding my own words to explain what these and other luminaries are saying. I want to discern what resonates as true for me, culled from countless accumulated volumes of spiritual knowledge. Why? Because as lost and confused as I can get in a sea of words, I always find some insight that puts my current experience in a greater context, providing me with a different point of view than what I’d been subscribing to. And tools. Something that throws me a life-line, as it were, allowing me to float awhile in the ocean-of-emotion that can, at times, overwhelm my psyche.
Now is one of those times. Without going into detail, I’ll just say that the words “dread”, “doubt”, “resistance” and “anxiety” have popped up more frequently than I’d like in my spiritual diary. As I would to a child who is having a tantrum, I tell my agitated self to “use my words”. Name what I’m feeling so as to step back and get a clearer look at what’s happening. Take the time I need to respond calmly, vs being propelled into a fight, flight or freeze mentality. In no particular order I take time to steady my breathing, sometimes synching the breath with a phrase or affirmation: “all is well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well”.
Sometimes a visualization comes to my aid. While laying in a claustrophobia-inducing MRI machine recently I closed my eyes and visualized an infinite blue sky, a smooth turquoise sea and white sand (I typoed “sane”) beach. Inspirational reading, mantra chanting, invoking the Light, doing a walking meditation or journal-writing are other ways I stay afloat in my daily life. This week’s life preserver came in the form of Swami Radhananda’s commentary on the inner light:
“When the Light lights up your mind, first you may have to address what it reveals – all the fears hidden in the dark, the issues left unaddressed – and clean up the clutter. And with the space that emerges, you may then experience a different kind of fear, what you could call a holy fear, a fear of the unknown, luminous mind.”
The truth is, I’m the one choosing how I experience what’s happening around me. An hour of lying on my back in a tube barely bigger than my body can be a cause for extreme panic, or for a seaside siesta in my mind. It all depends on not getting dragged away by what Singer’s maniacal roommate has to say. The genius of Swami Radhananda, Michael Singer or Chogyam Trungpa is that they ventured so deeply into that MRI of the psyche that they came out the other side with a crystal clear mind. A mind that is free of the subjectivity and conditioning that prejudice my perceptions. It is from the perspective of this unbiased, unblemished witness that one can respond to the world and it’s problems. The way to “get there” is to not leave one’s center of awareness in the first place. By one’s center of awareness I mean that space of objectivity and detachment from which I can see the proverbial forest for the trees. Through a combination of expressing my emotions in writing and then doing some spiritual practice I was able to calm my roiling anxiety, letting it move through me without running away or ruminating.
That “place” is our natural state. As T.S. Eliot said: “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our searching will be to arrive where we started and know the place [and our true selves] for the first time.”
There but for several decades of conditioning go I.