I have been suffering a lot: months and months of insomnia, lying in bed as repeated, cold stabs of fear radiate from my lower back, and my gut churns and clenches. Days spent urgently, fearfully racing from one task to the next, just shy of a panic attack, always behind, always about to get laid off, always “not enough.” Evenings spent trying to get away from the suffering by using food and videos.
Egocentric karmic conditioning/self-hate says I “fell off the horse”: not meditating regularly, not recording enough, not exercising, blah, blah, blah. I did start listening to Practice recordings in bed so I’d wake to the Guide’s voice, or to the songs that help me to center. That sort of worked for a while.
I recalled the Guide saying that 3:00 a.m. is a wonderful time to meditate. It did occur to me a few times to do so, but...it gets hazy. Confusion dust. Conditioning going away for just long enough to lull me. I did record and listen: two-handed and interviews. “Not enough!” screams conditioning. Whatever. To have done it at all is a miracle so vast as to boggle the mind.
From a recording by the Guide for the anxiety class – one I would listen to in the middle of the night – in which “I” refers to any of us: “But here’s the one thing that I don’t do. The one thing that will actually work. And I don’t do it because I’m too afraid to do it. What is that? I don’t stop, sit down, and turn all my attention, all conscious awareness, to precisely what I am experiencing in this very moment.”
I’m awake in the middle of the night – no surprise – and my stomach is churning. I’ve felt the dread and heard all the stories hundreds of times now. Hundreds of times I’ve tried all the “fixes” that don’t work. And the above quote drops in. Okay, since I’m stuck here anyway, let’s really, really feel it. Just going to breathe and put all my attention on my gut. Not to get rid of it. To be with it.
Being with him was all he ever wanted.
In Gasshō, a thousand million times Gasshō,
Dan S.