Day 64

I did not feel like going home after work today. It helps to break patterns to mess with the head. Another pattern I've been breaking is stopping believing in emotional turnovers. Emotions are here to be felt not avoided, feared, or dealt with. There is nothing I can do about them because there's nothing I'm supposed to do about them. They're here to be experienced. It may sound like common sense, but how many times a day do we "do something" so that we don't feel bored or we turn on the music so that we don't feel alone or reach for the phone so that we don't feel confused about our being here.

I've been letting my emotions be even if they're nothing but minor discomforts or annoyances. Do you know which ones I'm talking about? Those funky feelings that you can't pinpoint or blame on anger, sadness or fear. When felt deeply, the funk does seem be coming from anger, sadness, or fear, but if felt even more deeply, they just go away as if there was nothing there. Technically, there is nothing there, but I'm speaking from the emotional point of view.

And so... here I am, at Silverlake Coffee, feeling...


The Practice

Thursday evening - 40 minute meditation and 1 hour Dharma talk
Friday morning - 15 minute meditation

Reflection

"How do you know when you're ready to be a teacher?" Asked the teacher at yesterday's Dharma talk, "when you begin to disappear."

I ask myself how much of the self I'm still holding on to. I suppose that anything that I still believe to be true about what I think is yet to be revealed. For the past few years, pieces of the self or the ego have been chipping away. Mostly, it has been a spontaneous chipping away. There goes that piece and there goes this piece. I'm not sure if chunks have dropped off. Overall, the pieces have accumulated into chunks.

If everything we think is true disappears, then what's left?

"The breath," said the teacher. "Coming back to the breath is coming back to stability."

It's true. It's about the only thing I know is true.