To Zen or Not to Zen



First of all you have to have gotten to that place where there's really no point in not taking a giant leap because everything in your world has completely shattered. In other words, it helps to be a little bit broken when you turn to mindfulness for answers. Otherwise, you might have a cavalier attitude and at the first sign of discomfort you'll head to the nearest door.

Second of all, there's no right way or wrong way no matter what the internet says. Meditation is one form toward mindfulness and highly touted because it works quite well. However, it isn't for the faint of heart. It takes effort.

Before I was ready and able to consider learning meditation, I had to go through several healings first. I had so many negative tapes running in my head that it was as loud as Niagara Falls and quieting all that could have been more than I had the determination for. Here's a rough draft of the layers I worked through:

  • Left home at age 15. This first journey made me realize that the world was full of very kind and creative people. This in turn corrected a disbelief I carried that there was nothing unique about my creativity and sensitivity and that I needed to grow some and be like everybody else. This lesson instilled in me that I was an artist, and that my work and ideas were exciting and important to some very successful creatives. I truly believe that this knowledge saved my life over the next twenty years. I believe that if I hadn't been told of my talent from extraordinarily gifted people I would have stopped believing it. I nurtured that kernel and eventually manifested it in the form of a small obsidian agate which became the energy for my work by that name. The strength I derived from being able to access my creative energy on demand, helped me live a writer's life straight through seventeen years of a really intense type of hell that comes from particularly dangerous marriages.
  • Age 32, returned to school, became the pet of many fine teachers, learned to be lyrical in my writing from a terrific Cherokee storyteller and learned some very important skills like critical thinking, university type writing (which is so fucking hard) self defense for women, critical reading and basically how to manifest an A average regardless of reoccurring bouts of pneumonia, poverty, rebellious sons, a sinking sensation in your gut and fairly severe domestic abuse.
  • Age 41, left my marriage in ten minutes but since I'd basically been packed for the last decade it really went fairly smoothly considering. Ten minutes isn't much stuff, especially while backing out of the driveway, praying to all the gods in the entire universe that you don't meet him coming back down the road, knowing with every mili-meter of DNA (and without the faintest shred of optimism to the contrary) and while every alarm you've ever heard times about ten is blaring in your ears, that you'll never be allowed to return. Every shred of your childhood, your children's, will be lost. But you're an artist. And some important people have assured you of that fact. And artists live for experience. And material things only clutter that up. And sentimentality equals death. So you're really fortunate at this particular crossroads because you get all the lessons in one stunning and crashing two by four across the head as opposed to having needles poked in every hour or so.
  • Most recently, age 57, I had to cross through the hardest, ugliest one of all. And I seriously thought it would kill me. So I bellyached about that for a few weeks and woke up one day bored with all that and, coincidentally, a short time later saw a Buddhist temple down the street and finally I was ready to learn meditation.
Here's the thing with going zen. It's like Janis said, Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose. And that's exactly what zen is. You can.not.care about the outcome. And you can't complain about the path. If it gets too painful? Then stop! Turn around, go back. There's no morality here, no right or wrong, it's your life, live it however you want to.

But choosing to stay on the path means lots of shit is going to happen. And lots of it is going to be ugly and cruel like you could never imagine. You have no idea. Take your worst fears and just keep multiplying them. Closer.

The road to salvation, the holy man said, is as narrow as the sharp edge of a razor.

So it's a leap. Because your life isn't going to get any better. It's going to get worse. You might not sleep through the night for ten years. You might walk around with raging blood pressure. People start getting knocked down around you. Maybe you get set up a time or two. You might start going longer periods of time without long girlfriend walks and talks. You're in between and trying to find your footing.

But then, suddenly, you've saved a couple of lives.

It can happen fast that way.

More later.
















No comments:

Post a Comment