Day 62

I watched my cat Mia yesterday evening for about an hour. First, she meowed a few times as if she wanted something, then she licked herself for several minutes, then she heard something and her ears perked up in the direction where the sound was coming from, then she continued cleaning herself, then she looked at me and meowed again, then she walked over to her water dish, drank, and then came back and sat, waiting. It was so apparent that every move she made or didn't make was spontaneous and unguarded. She did not choose to go there or here, she just went. She was not in conflict about licking herself or not licking herself, she just did. And when she was done cleaning, eating, drinking, meowing, or playing, then she would just sit there looking wherever she felt inclined to look for however long before another flow of activity would start.

Why am I talking about my cat Mia? It's easy to see where we go astray in our own so-called stressful lives if we take the time to take a good look at animal behavior. There is no agenda, inner conflict, or complicated decision-making process in animal life. The first counter-argument to explain their behavior would be that they don't have the mental capacity to create problems and that's true. However, after being in meditation both on and off the mediation bench, it becomes obvious that we too would not create problems and be one with the ebb and flow of life if we did not adhere to everything our mind tells us.  Adyashanti confirms this in his book, The End of Your World, when he writes about his own awakening experience, "As the light of awakening starts to penetrate on the level of mind, we see that mind has no inherent reality to it. It's a tool that reality can use, but it's not reality."

The Practice

Monday evening - 35 minutes of Zazen at ZCLA
Tuesday morning - 10 minutes on the meditation bench
Wednesday morning - 30 minutes on the meditation bench

Reflection

For the past few days, I've been having this frontal lobe headache. I know it has something to do with the weather, but I don't delve into the reason too much. The discomfort is just there. I find that including the headache in the rest of my experience of seeing, hearing, feeling, breathing, listening, working, reading, eating, etcetera, instead of focusing on it as this isolated event, turns the headache into a fuzzy tingling sensation. I'm no longer carrying this heavy load inside my frontal lobe as I used to whenever I had those type of headaches.

Emotional loads tend to work the same way. If I include them in the rest of my experience instead of focusing on them or trying to avoid them at all cost, they sort of disperse in the rest of the body and the load becomes much lighter. Don't take my word for it; see if it works for you.