Night and Day

 During my 10 day Vipassana course my favorite meditation was the two hour sitting at 4:30 in the morning.  My mind felt so still surrounded by the sleepy silence of the outside world.  I could sit knowing that there was nowhere else to go and nothing else to do at that moment.  My only task was to look inward and introduce myself to my own mind.  These meetings were not always easy.  The stories that I tell myself are not always pleasant, in fact many of them are very dark and painful.  With nowhere to run from them, I realized the comforting truth that no matter how powerful they seem eventually they will lose their strength and evolve into something else.  The negative ones evolve into positive ones and the positive ones evolve back into negative ones in a never ending cycle of dark and light.  When I stopped trying to force away the negative thoughts and cling to the positive ones, I was able to sit still and let them rotate around with no attachment or aversion.  The division between the two became blurry and I no longer felt the need to label one as good and the other as bad.  All manifestations were simply a truth of our impermanent reality.

I would then step outside into the crisp morning and experience the same phenomenon in the external world.  I would stand at the top of the hill where the earth met the sky at the center of where the dark of night met the light of day.  The moon would sink down and nestle itself among the trees as the sun began to peak up over the distant mountains.  As the glow of day started to fill the sky, the stars would disappear one by one invisible to the eye but still present.  Right in the middle of the sky the two extremes would touch in a kiss of white light.  Although seemingly separate realities these two states of the world could not exist separate from the other.  The dark of night will always end in the light of day.  So is the truth of our internal reality.  No mental state exists in and of itself.  Each one is in a constant state of evolution and will eventually disappear into the light of the next one.  In this way we can sit in peace in our dark moments knowing that they too are impermanent and will eventually end in light.    

Groundless state

"All the smiling enlightened people you see in pictures or in person had to go through the process of encountering their full-blown neurosis, their methods of looking for ground.  When we start to interrupt our ordinary ways of calling ourselves names and patting ourselves on the back, we are doing something extremely brave.  Slowly we edge toward the open state, but let's face it, we are moving toward a place of no handholds, no footholds, no mindholds." - Pema Chodron

I just returned from a ten day silent meditation course and faced some of the hardest demons of my life.  As I sat in silence for hours on end with nowhere to run from my hauntings, I created light from dark.  The dark never disappeared but I was able to transform it into something different, something beautiful.  When searching for truth we pass through many moments of groundlessness in which we have nothing more to hold on to.  There is no scapegoat left to blame, no quick fix to cling to, no story to play over the truth.  When our crutches are first removed we panic and fall out of habit.  After being on the ground long enough we realize that the story we had been telling ourselves about needing crutches was in fact false and we get up and walk away lighter and freer.  Don't let the moments on the ground scare you away from walking towards the truth.