A digest for conscious living
I was tempted to skip my practice this morning. After the incessant schedule that I had last week, I just had to sleep a bit longer this morning and the difficulty in finding the time for it seemed like a very acceptable excuse for a day off. I did however manage to take a break from work today and carry out my practice and I am very glad that I did. Im starting to get into shape with my meditation again- it has been a long time since I felt that level of ease while quieting my mind. I had a strong image today at one point during my meditation… a rounded pebble being dropped into a well and sinking into the dark stillness of the water; finally coming to rest on the sandy floor in profound silence.
Counting the days of preparation leading up to beginning this blog, I have done my yoga and meditation practice now for 18 out of the last 21 days. This is about as regularly as I have ever practiced, and I am definitely starting to feel something happening within me. Once again however I have been reminded of one of the most basic tenet of meditation practice: Whatever expectations one brings to one’s practice will almost certainly not be fulfilled. Its like asking someone who has never tasted a strawberry to try to imagine what it would taste like to actually eat one- any expectations would be absurd. The interesting thing about it however, is that its as if every meditation is a new flavor just as unpredictable and original as the first.
Today I feel strongly that my journey is underway… I feel like I have been on a sailboat that has been slowly and silently moving away from the original cove of its departure. At a certain point when one has reached a certain distance from land, looking back it seems as if one is no longer moving away. The changes to the vast coastline one is moving from are so slow as to be imperceptible for long periods. Today I feel the wind filling my sails and I am filled with a quiet excitement and peace as I finally stop looking back at the land and instead turn and look around me, smiling, at the ocean of freedom on which I sail.
“This I believe is the great Western truth: that each of us is a completely unique creature and that, if we are ever to give any gift to the world, it will have to come out of our own experience and fulfillment of our own potentialities, not someone else’s. In the tradition of the Orient, on the other hand, and generally in all traditionally grounded societies, the individual is cookie molded. His duties are put upon him in exact and precise terms, and there’s no way of breaking out of them. When you go to a guru to be guided and the spiritual way, he knows just where you are on the traditional path, just where you have to go next, just what you must do to get there. He’ll give you his picture to wear, so you can be like him. That wouldn’t be a proper Western pedagogical way of guidance. We have to give our students guidance in developing their own pictures of themselves. What each must seek in his life never was, on land or sea. It is to be something out of his own unique potentiality for experience, something that never as been and never could have been experienced by anyone else.”
– Joseph Campbell, “The Power of Myth”
Goodnight,
Kikta