Wanted to share what I’ve learned about self-pacing after AYP practice since Feb 2009. I had a significant, but gentle opening during the AYP Mensch Mill retreat over the past few days, and a lot of stuff clicked into place. There’s a nice story and a couple of analogies to relay here.
The anxious student asked the Zen master how long to enlightenment.
The Zen Master answered, a long time, at least 10 years.
The student said, Well I will work twice as hard.
The Zen master said, Then it will take 20 years.
No! said the committed student, I will work three times as hard.
Well then, said the Zen master, It will take 30 years.
After this past year, I’ve started to find that effort towards enlightenment is a bit like one of those Chinese finger traps. You know the ones where you put your two index fingers in, and then you can’t pull them out again. The harder you try and pull your fingers (consciousness) out of the finger trap (maya, delusion) the tighter the trap becomes. It’s not until you relax and cease your desperate activity that you can extricate your fingers from the trap.
I’m not an ‘advait-ass’ who would advocate doing nothing, I’ve just found that for me personally it works to:
-Leave the effort out of doing
-Stop trying to control the pace of spiritual unfolding (i.e. increase the pace), practices help, but ultimately if you make progress it’s an act of grace, the ego had nothing to do with it
-Not to seek fireworks, ecstatic pleasure, or really ‘intense’ experience if it comes great, if not, great – but either way I feel like experiences don’t have much to do with enlightenment, since enlightenment isn’t exactly an experience
-do the practises like brushing your teeth. I don’t particularly want to brush my teeth, and I certainly don’t get overexcited about it. But I just do it anyway, it just happens, I wake up, go my bathroom and start brushing my teeth.
So my personal story to place everything in context. I came across AYP in Feb 2009, and pretty quickly began doing regular practices. The practices became a twice daily part of my life in June/August 2010, but there had definitely been periods of interspersed regular practice in between. I’ve been meditating for about seven years in one form or another, since I was 19. There was considerable inner silence before I came to AYP, a lot of purification had already happened via various methods. Ecstatic pleasure started to arise in summer 2010, as a direct result of SBP and AYP practices.
For my entire life, whilst I’ve always been inclined to joyous highs and high energy levels, but since I was a little child I’ve always been completely unhappy with, depressed, and dissatisfied with life. I’ve never really wanted to be here. I’ve always had this longing that could not be satisfied by anything worldly, a seeming remembrance of something better.
When I found AYP, I knew I’d finally found my life purpose, the reason I came here. Needless to say, when the ecstatic pleasure arose from AYP, I leaped on it. The divine had a tough, but ultimately kind, lesson in store for me. Instead of allowing my intuition (which comes from beyond the ego) to guide me in my pace of practice, I allowed the mind to set the pace. And the mind was really only concerned with one thing: getting more, getting pleasure, getting gratification.
I started to feel pretty disingenuous. I’d come to AYP with the lofty desire for enlightenment. But I was abusing my practices to mainline as much ecstatic pleasure as possible, thrill-seek powerful ‘spiritual experiences’, avoid dealing with painful emotions in normal reality, and my gratification-seeking ego had taken over control of a process that had nothing to do with it. Promptly, the ecstatic pleasure dried up completely, and I was left trying to find a way to get it back, trying different practices (yogi bhajan kundalini yoga) and basically trying to get my source of gratification back. Not really that much different to a drug-addiction.
The divine message I was given flowed into me, and was pretty clear: Do you come to this seeking pleasure? Seeking some form of cheap gratification? Hoping not to have to face your pain? Because you want to escape? Because you’d rather not deal with reality? Do you think enlightenment is something you are going to ‘get’?
The answer in my heart was obvious. Enlightenment is not really about escaping suffering, or avoiding reality. It’s not about gratification. It’s not something ‘you’ can ever ‘get’. By this time, I’d completely overloaded and practices would only yield a barren depression. I stopped, and as I did, a huge, fresh passion for life erupted in me, and I suddenly enjoyed life like never before. I cared nothing for transcendence anymore, and forgot about the spiritual for a while.
I learned to give a little instead of trying to get, and to develop a small but growing ability to extend love to everyone around me unconditionally – strangers in the street, colleagues, family, particularly to extend unconditional love to those people who annoyed me, who were rude to me, who were unkind, who seemed to be crazy or violent (I live in NYC so there are a quite a few). It’s pretty easy, I walk around extending love to every perception in my mind, particularly when one of those perceptions (e.g. someone who is particularly rude/inharmonious) throws up negative reaction conditioning in my body mind. Hopefully I learned a little bit more humility too, and perhaps I’ve been unchained a little from my own narcissism. I learned to look at all the unconscious beliefs and motivations behind my actions.
Now I’m back on practices again. But I approach them with awe and reverence, and am not attached to using them as a way to try and feel good all the time. I don’t jump into them with huge enthusiasm, like a hungry dog eating it’s breakfast, but I go in with hopefully a little restraint and respect. I’ve also learned that my optimum practice time is very short: 2 minutes SBP, 8 minutes DM twice daily. I’m in no rush to unfold, no rush to become enlightened. I’ve realized that it comes at the price of letting go of everything. I’ve also realized I’m not yet ready to let go of everything, but I can take it day by day, and let go a bit at a time. I’m prepared to take long, clear, honest and sometimes painful looks at myself and the causes of suffering and identification and occasionally that clarity allows me to let go another attachment or aversion. So now I come to my practices every day, not expecting anything, not craving results, favoring inner silence and feeling ‘normal’ to flashy energy experiences and emotional highs, but with just a touch of quiet delight or a small smile as I go about my day.
So that was how I was chastened. Knowing my ego, it will probably try and run away with me again, but fortunately the divine is patient. :-)
Also a few related practical notes:
Whenever I'm feeling particularly good, and liking that feeling, as a result of spiritual practices (or anything) I often firstly open my heart to the divine, offer my experience for sharing with them, and say - although I'm afraid to say this, take this good experience away from me if you want, I don't want to be foolishly attached to it. Sounds harsh, but it really helps you getting sucked into attachment to good experiences, which we all know are impermanent.
Also, this may help people of my 'type' but is probably not relevant for everyone, I am:
-extreme emotional sensitivity, sensitive to psychic energy, very strongly affected by the energies of others around me
-tendency to very skinny body type
-extremely oversensitive to meditation
-tendency to be in the clouds, live in imagination, easily become un-grounded
I've found eating meat is just a very useful to remaining grounded. I don't naturally want to eat meat all that much, in fact I love to subsist on green smoothies, vegetable juices, salads and not much else - but I really find meat is so useful to maintaining some balance. I avoid getting loads of calories from carbs like pasta, grains etc and find that personally a very simple diet of LOADS of fresh vegetables combined with some meat (preferably free-range, organic, grass-fed for better omega 3/6/9 ratio, and humanely treated) helps to keep me sane and balanced.
I also do physical activities which pump up my grounded-ness, and have found weight-lifting is particularly helpful as it seems to boost my testosterone levels.
