a mindful lobotomy
this mind. this wild wild mind. like an untamed beastly creature striding through the field of life and illusion and delusion. this last 10 days I took in a dip in the Ganges of Dhamma and sat my first Vipassana Meditation as taught by Goenka. I am sure many of you are familiar with this teaching of the Buddha or know of it but for those that don’t, it is a 10 day completely silent sitting. each day is a 17.5 hour day waking at 4am and going to sleep at 9.30pm, meditating from 4.30am-6.30am, 8am-11am, 1pm-5pm, 6pm-7pm, 8.30pm-9pm with a discourse from the teacher from 7-8.30pm. you share noble silence, have no phone, no writing, no reading and no food after 11am, only a piece of fruit at 5pm.It was one of the most challenging things I have ever done, and also the most beautifully profound experience. humanities limbs and backbone are laced with a bitter misery, a clinging or aversion to everything, an absolute desire to race to death but no will to face it. we paint ourselves with so many stories, adorn ourselves with scriptures, ideas and philosophies and offer a perfectly crafted projection of ourselves to the world. we dwell in blind devotion and emotional games, commercial spirituality, and rely on our intellectual understanding of things to ease our discomfort of not truly understanding the deep nature of ourselves or our existence. I always wondered how to explode the truth of myself… questioned, how can we shatter these characters we create, strip back the layers and meet in the objective totality of truth.so by some cosmic redirection I arrived here… to show up for myself, to find and make a home inside this body. and I began. to dissect, dissolve, disintegrate. to pick apart the stitching, pry apart my ribs, and pull out the stuffing of my mind and heart and really, truly, deeply observe my ideas, thoughts, feelings, and sensations. in this place I sat. I sat. I sat. I sat with the cities in my bones, I knocked down doors to bolted rooms, and quietly walked through shadowed hallways and found myself in the catacombs of yesterday’s memories and tomorrow’s futures. It was brutal. and beautiful. some days the minutes felt like hours, lifetimes! and sometimes the hours felt like mere moments flashed by in one singular out breath. I wanted to run screaming. I wanted to leave every single day. I wanted to ignorantly just slide back into the scramble of life and forget the whole thing. but I didn’t. I stayed. and I sat some more. and slowly slowly in the ever elusive and constantly changing nature of it all, rising and passing, I started seeing clearly, getting space, finding my breath and loosing ‘myself’.I truly went mad. I laughed hysterically at the stories my mind made up, the places I went, the dreams I had, the pain I created, the pleasure I ruminated in, and then, one day, after hours of untying the knots, I got still. I saw my mind die in a particularly funny vision and found myself dancing equipoise out on the horizon line of my soul. it was so clear. no clouds. no storms. no crashing waves. just a piercing shade of Indigo meeting an endless open vast sky. no me. no my. no I. in this psycho somatic experience surging within the framework of the body, I couldn’t have realised the more phenomenal truth of impermanence and change. I found the very real, clear and direct roadmap to my own equanimous salvation within. here I found refuge in myself. the path of truth, the path of Dhamma, the law of nature, as it is, the communion with change, ‘Anicca Anicca Anicca’ and glimpses of liberation, free from dukkha – suffering. on the last day of silence, over the burnt copper golden and green Australian bush, it snowed. it was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. we all stood there. silently watching. smiles across faces. It lasted only for about 5 minutes. as fertile milky cloud ships sailed across a fading stormy glow sky, the sun came out, and something inside of me cracked open. I couldn’t stop sobbing. It was mother nature’s gift herself, the lesson of Dhamma, the impermanence of it all. It is so insanely achingly beautiful this life. what an exquisite gift. we are so beyond lucky to have been given this experience. and these things are for certain, the moon always rises and passes away, the sun always rises and passes away, and so will we. the skies, opalescent peach flesh flush and translucent blue morning stories will fade, and just like that, the bells will ring. time will beckon us forward, forward. start again. start again. let yourself be infused, continuously, continuously, with loving kindness, compassionate love, sila, samadhi and panna, and run, run hard, persistently, diligently, and patiently towards the light. Metta xxxx
indigo sparke 