When Darkness Descends

Doom. Gloom. Darkness has descended and the world has lost its color. Your world is black and white. It is either all good or all bad and today Bad has smacked you in the face and stands sneering at you, glaring. Even the will to struggle seems to have evaporated. 

What to do?

Do nothing.

I know, that seems like rotten advice but bear with me. By saying "do nothing" I don't mean to imply you should slink off into a corner, lick your wounds and sink into your despair like an unsuspecting ant who has wandered onto quicksand. Slinking and licking and wandering are somethings. I mean do nothing. Notice what happens when you do nothing. Your eyes continue to blink, your organs continue to function, your breathing continues in and out, in and out. The earth continues to revolve around the sun, the stars continue to appear in the heavens, the whole cosmos goes about its mysterious business without any regard for your stinky mood. Stay here and keep noticing. There is an undercurrent here, a gentle pull that you might miss at first it is so undemanding. Contrasted with the loud strident voice of your pissy mood, it is easy to miss. But I guarantee you it is here. You don't feel it? That's because today is not your day to feel it, not because it isn't there. Struggling to find it will not work. Become absolutely still. Concentrate on your breathing. In and out. In and out.

Boring!  Yes, I know. But do it anyway. Notice your breath. Count each one if you like. If a thought intrudes allow it to pass then just come back to the counting. Start over if you lose your place. One. Two. Three.  But my life sucks! One. Two. Three. Four. Five. This is just stupid! One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Over and over and over. You won't give up. Oh, maybe today you might give up and go back to the fun of wallowing in despair. But you will be back, mark my words. You will be back because you know your salvation lies somewhere in the silence. You know it not because you read it here, you just know it. You have always known it. It's only a matter of time now.

Darkness comes not to pull you into an abyss but to show you the value of light. The problem always comes with the seeds of the solution and the seeds are cultivated and nourished in the silence.

Go. Now.

A Note to First Time Meditators:

There have been many books written on meditation. There are seminars, intensives, retreats to sign up for. There are rules everywhere. Legs in this posture. Hands like this. Hold your head in this position and your spine in that. Eyes open. Eyes closed. While certainly not harmful, be clear that these rules are mere stage props. Do what feels right to you. There is nothing more important than the willingness to show up, the earnest desire to find your way home to yourself. If you like the idea of prayer begin with a simple one such as "Please show me the way to happiness" and then just be silent and trust the process. Let go of any notion you may have had about what it should look like or how you should feel. Let the discipline to show up be the only effort you expend. The rest will take care of itself.

The Last Place You Look

My dad had an impish, goofy sense of humor. He was fond of observing people, not to judge them in any way, just out of sheer fascination. He was famous in our family for going to Disneyland and spending a lot of his time there just sitting on a bench "to watch people". One of the many things that tickled him was hearing people talk about searching for a lost item and saying, at the end of their story, "and it was in the last place I looked". "As if they would keep looking after they found it", he would always say, and giggle his endearing little giggle.

If we had an instinct that would unfailingly tell us where the last place was, in terms of lost items, we would of course go there first and our days of having to search for anything would be over. I can remember my brother demonstrating this frequently enough in our family. When there was something missing he would become very silent and still and meditative for a few moments or half an hour, however long it would take, and then he would rise and, more often than not, go straight to it. He taught us that the first place to look is inside, not outside.

Lost items, happiness, peace, fulfillment, joy, passion, it's all the same. It is our long ingrained habit, as human beings, to look outward first. The world is so chock full of stuff, so mesmerizing! It must be out there, we say, and so we look and look, we acquire things, relationships, experiences and skills. Yet, for many there is still the feeling of not enough, not quite, not exactly what I was looking for. Sometimes we have to look until we are at the point of total exhaustion and desperation, until an overwhelming feeling of resignation or some uncontrollable crisis drives us inside. It is then we are amazed to discover, if we stay inside long enough and get to know the place, that everything we are looking for, and so much more than we ever dreamed was available, is there-- in the quiet, undemanding, elegant simplicity of inner space.

Oh boy, isn't it always in the last place you look?

The Truth About Love Songs

   What we have daydreamed about and yearned for has been right here all along. 

Unrequited, done me wrong, falling in, falling out, jilted and angry, dreamy and tender--love songs run the achy breaky gamut of emotions. They make us cry, they bring us joy, they make the hard heart tender and the tender heart harder. They represent mankind's struggle with love since the beginning of time and across all cultures and societies.

A few days ago I heard the remake of an old love song I listened to repeatedly many years ago when I was head over heels in love and couldn't imagine myself as being complete without that special someone. You know the one-- the perfect one, the one who is your soul mate, your twin flame, your raison d'etre.  The sun rises and sets in him, the moon revolves around him, all others pale in comparison to this one radiant love. The song took me back to those drama filled days, to the feelings I used to feel, to the pain of a love that never would be, to the despair, the longing, the yearning. And....it made me laugh. Now, if you had been by my side to see the depth of pain I experienced at the time, the many years it took to recover, you might think that to be an inappropriate, perhaps insane, or at the very least insensitive response. But I loved my reaction, and I'll tell you why.

Emotional pain, I've found, is an interesting thing. We think we are trying to avoid it yet at a very deep level, if we are honest, we can see that we crave it like children crave cookies. Not so good for us, yet we love the taste. Why? There's something about it that will teach us what we need to know about life. We know this deeply, unconsciously usually, and we seek it out. A very deep pain will either kill us or enroll us in the University of Truth, where the course of study may take a lifetime but the content is life changing.

Why do we continually look outside ourselves for fulfillment? If I finally have this or that, if I finally attain this or that, if I finally find him or her, if I finally arrive at the place I have always wanted to arrive, feel the feelings I always wanted to feel, finally find fulfillment. We grasp at the future, agonize over the perceived insufficiencies of the past and pin all our hopes on a day that never comes. Why does it never come? Because today is the only day we have. Now is the only time we have. This is the simple truth of existence which we overlook again and again. When we first see this we may experience the insight as resignation, disappointment. "Is this all there is?", we ask. That is, until we have a good look around in this new place called now, until we are silent and surrendered and at long last sense the presence of Love, our constant loyal companion, who lives here. Love sees us in all the raw truth of what we are, sees our faults, notices our self-serving behaviors, overlooks the fact that we ignore her presence most of the time and yet insists on loving us, on leaning into us until the sweetness at our core is reached. With awareness of this Love in our lives we are given the tenderness of a thousand mothers, the wisdom of a thousand masters, the passion of a thousand lovers. This one true Love fills us, blurs our boundaries, overflows into the world and changes the energy of everything.  

Love flows into our lives from the inside out, not the outside in. To meditate, to pray, or in whatever manner to be devoted to finding one's own sweet core is the only sane route to fulfillment. And when we are wise to this truth we laugh to realize that what we have daydreamed about and yearned for has been right here all along. Love is not something we acquire, love is what we are. The paradox is this: When we are able to contentedly sing and dance to the light of the moon all by ourselves, we are astonished to suddenly find love all around us and the love songs we then sing to others are true and good and lovely and strong.