Walking on Air
before we sleep can we wake?
Our story, our likes and dislikes, even the quirks of our personality are severe limitations to our being, while also being the path to that which we truly are. One doesn’t usually consider one’s dislikes and likes to be limitations. We are too busy trying to avoid the first and attain the second. Sometimes, in the course of that effort, we have to stretch past our stretch, as a yoga teacher of mine liked to say. Take the discipline inherent in any art form. To achieve your vision, you must undertake that which you don’t want. When I worked with glass, I ended each day with tiny but annoying cuts for maybe 100 days in a row. Then, all of a sudden, I didn’t cut myself anymore. My body had learned; my dexterity in sync with the material and movement.
Many spiritual traditions include some sort of work practice. The novitiate might accept it as his dues, wondering perhaps whether the practice was merely practical in design. Someone has to sweep the floor, cook the meals, and clean the bathrooms. Why not have the students do it? Kill two birds with one stone. They can work on overcoming “attachment”. Before long, however, a transformation takes place, or it did for me, and, I imagine, for many others.
There is a secret inside of work practice, and we all have work practice. It’s the things you don’t want to do. That’s why it is called work. Children know the difference. They might toss their toys around gleefully, and pile them here and there. But when asked to pile them in their toy chest at the end of their play, they vigorously object. Same movements, same gestures, but entirely different meaning. “Work” is the unwilled portion of the activity. The paperwork after a session, insurance forms, cleaning the sink, taking the car in; the examples are many. Why do we hate them so much?
We hate them because we are slaves to our likes and dislikes. Mistakenly we imagine that freedom is to have the good without the bad. But we are looking in the wrong direction. Freedom is being released from good and bad.
The funny thing is, once you are released from good and bad; once you let go the taste of yourself, doing what is not in line with your preferences is like walking on air. You want to do more and more of it because it is a demonstration to you within your own body/mind-being, that you are free. Suddenly anything is possible. You can do things that are not in service to preference, which means you can do anything. There is an effervescence to it; you discover there is nothing in the way. Where once you were annoyed, you are now amazed. Later, that amazement; euphoria really, settles down into a calm. Without the negative emotions attached to the previously unwilled activity, you experience the uncanny sensation of not even being human. Of course you are human, but you are a human who has transcended limitations.
Many things can happen when you have had a taste of freedom.
Perhaps the most significant is that you don’t feel like yourself. Depending on your predilection, this might be a relief, or cause fear. Many people have the sense that they have no orient. They fear that they will not be able to do what they need to do. All the energies have been tied up in the project to be; to have what I want and not what I don’t want. The energies have been tied up in the story that you both tell yourself and are. Maybe you are the victim, or the perfect one. Perhaps you are the one who has never been understood. Most likely you either blamed others or turned your blame on yourself.
Now, suddenly, the story collapses and you don’t know what to do.
It is important at this stage not to call yourself back to yourself. You may not have much ability here. That is ok. Frankly, if you get a big enough glimpse of what it is to live outside of the confines of what you took yourself to be, reentering it will make you sick. But there is also some strange sort of preference at work here. Maybe you want to live inside your story. And that’s ok, really. If not, you will need to learn to experience the spaciousness of non-perspectival being simultaneous with being this one. It is possible. Or perhaps I should say, the impossible is possible.
Namaste,
Leslie
At this point in my life, I find myself more accepting of "work." It is what it is. It is necessary and won't entirely go away, so I approach it with more acceptance than I have had in previous decades. It helps to make a game out of it, or use it as time to listen to a book or music. Adding a benefit is beneficial.
Thank you. I stared at this wonderful photograph while I listened.
I've been thinking about the principle of the conservation of the negative. How I live in flight from the negative, while holding on to it with a death-grip (and that is no exaggeration.) A very long prison sentence, and then, sometimes, I see there is no lock on the door.