28-Day Programme for Real Happiness with Mollie: Day 19
By Mollie McClelland 27/08/2011
Day 19 -
This week has been a really interesting one, full of blossoming possibilities, energy work, good friends and end of summer fun. And this morning when I began my sit I had this almost too happy feeling – an almost mania of energy. A kind of wildness of thoughts and possibilities and imagining. What was most interesting about that mania was how physical it has felt. I didn’t sleep well last night, wrote into the early morning, rode my bike 20 miles yesterday, but still had this amazing energy. As I st down, I began with this thought that I did not know how I was going to sit for half an hour with that kind of energy.
Here is where the stride feels good. The body is used to this now, so it can hold the seated pose for the duration. And the stillness allowed me to witness the energy in the body, thoughts and emotions without reacting to them.
At one point I went into a particularly long and imaginative thought-train. As I realized this, I had this joyful feeling inside, but then, more specifically than that, I was able to go deep into that sensation and feel where it located in the body. I felt this sort of buzzing in the imaginative belly area (I say imaginative, because in last few days I have felt or seen a sort of mental picture of my body, which sometimes feels located in organs and tissues, and sometimes feels beyond the specificity of space that my body inhabits)
As I brought that buzzing and tingling into awareness I opened to include the breath in awareness. The breath naturally slowed within a few exhales. For a few breaths there was this much deeper sense of peace or maybe more accurately detachment, from the events playing out in the body.
I have witnessed the kind of fleeting nature of these experiences – that after a few moments of concentration and awareness, the mind tends to drift again. As the mind drifts, the body creates reactions to the thoughts in the form of sensations, emotions, excitement or fear, etc. Then awareness comes back, I witness the thought and the breath for a few moments, and then off again. It seems like a perpetual cycle, and in some ways it is. However, somewhere inside of that, the awareness creates a sense of space.
By the end of the meditation, the kind of mania that I started the sitting with had faded. A sense of balance arose. The feedback loop of thoughts and physical reaction seemed interrupted by the pauses to focus on the breath. Again, the shoulders unwind, the body remembers the kind of zero state of the breath. And then as it runs off into thought again, there is a little less energy built up already.
To continue on some other reflections, the purpose of the meditation is not to get rid of the experience of the mind/body network. So that calming is not a “goal” as such. It is not to douse the fires of activity with water, nor is it to calm the angers, remove the fears, etc. But what seems to happen is that the light of awareness detaches the physical/mental/emotional experience from the core awareness. The body is anxious or excited. Am “I” anxious? Am “I” excited? Am “I” experiencing the energy of anxiety?
This morning’s variation of mania was an example. The body now feels trained to sit within it. I might not have been able to do that 6 months ago. And with sitting, awareness scans the thoughts, feelings and emotions that are all in play. When I come back to focus on the breath, the interplay of emotion, thought and physicality takes a moment’s rest. In that process, today, it allowed for a kind of balancing of that energy, without an intention to balance the energy. That sense of calming and peace just come, in a way by doing without doing.
I am grateful for that. I am grateful to have found that peace, without trying to push away what was there. By going through it, it seems to have moved, and that is a great gift.
Om Tat Sat.
Om Shanti
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