I woke up at 5am again this morning and it was dark out. This time of year it stays dark for a few hours but the winter sunrises can be so colorful before the sun reaches the cloud ceiling on the horizon and turns the sky January-Gray.
Life’s water flows from darkness.
Search the darkness don’t run from it.
Night travelers are full of light,and you are, too; don’t leave this companionship.
I really love this poem by Rumi poem. It sends my mind into another long-winded adventure that I’m sitting down to write now for myself and maybe to share.
My wife and I like to take trips on our birthdays and they usually involve traveling to a National Park to stand in awe of natural wonders. Tara’s video about the Night Travelers made me think about our adventure just a few hours south of us to the rolling hills of rural Kentucky. My wife’s birthday is in late winter and the weather isn’t ideal for outdoor adventures, so we got creative and took an unusual trip. The wonders of this particular National Park don’t exist on the surface. They are deep down in the eerie darkness of the earth, where dark waters flow and enormous caverns lie silently miles down beneath the surface in one of America’s largest underground systems: Mammoth Cave. We both love visiting mountains, forests, the ocean, really anyplace outdoors and as such didn’t have a lot of grand expectations for this trip but the temperature and weather in Mammoth Cave stays consistent throughout the seasons, so we booked our tours. We arrived at the grand entrance of the cave and turned our gazes up toward the sky and around to the daffodil covered hillsides for one last time and left the light of the February sun behind us, to travel deep down a series of wide stairs, with helpful handrails and then eventually down very narrow ladders into the darkness of this subterranean wonderland. It was more thrilling than we expected and I’ve always had a mild amount of claustrophobia but had no choice except to fully face that day. My heart raced and I felt the creeping signs of panic rip through my body as we squeezed through narrow passages. That was followed by moments of immense relief to finally make it into large cavernous rooms adorned with glowing stalagmites and stalactites.
By far, the most fascinating aspect of our trip to Mammoth Cave was learning about its primary explorer, Stephen Bishop who in the mid 1800s mapped more of that cave and dove deeper into that system than any man ever had. He was a self taught geologist and he guided curious explorers by torch and candlelight alone. He found his freedom not in the sun and wind and green hills of Kentucky, where the light and moon shone with steady and consistent regularity but way down, in those harrowing explorations of the underworld.
Standing safely with our park ranger and naturalist guide I was in awe of the immense courage it must have taken to be the first to explore and map that cave. At one point during his explorations, Stephen Bishop had to carry several ladders down in order to traverse an open expanse he called “The Bottomless Pit”. I couldn’t help but to be inspired as I listened to our guide skillfully orate Stephen’s adventures.
After we returned safely to the surface and warmth of the sun once again, I thought a lot about this inward journey that some of us are compelled to undertake and like Stephen, how I sensed some years ago that my inner freedom might not lie at the top of a mountain with a sweeping vista but instead deep within me, down in the very depths of my being… where courage is the spark and the light wouldn’t show without the dark to surround it.
Years earlier, my wife and I took another very unusual birthday adventure. Before I turned 35 I lost a sister tragically. She was a heart transplant recipient but died 5 years later from an accidental overdose. Shortly before she passed, I’d started becoming very interested in meditation and this inward journey. There’s a lot I could say about the exact details of what catalyzed this interest but for the sake of how long this story is starting to get I’ll summarize: intense and almost unbearable psychological suffering. I’d almost ended my life on a couple occasions but somehow found enough worth in myself and love for my family to look inward for liberation. Like many people, I had read lots of inspiring books about folks who done some deep dives within themselves and was fortunate to find the book Radical Acceptance. In it she talks about some of her experiences with Vipassana and that lit my own torch and set me down those stairs on this path, deep into those dark geographies. I wanted so much to truly know myself, be at peace, not feel so swung around by the pendulum of my emotions and their connected traumas, to embrace my creativity and be more myself but most urgently I wanted to find freedom from my suffering and I knew those roots were deep down like that hole in Kentucky ground.
So a year after losing my sister, my wife and I took an adventure a few hours north to a Vipassana retreat in a more strictly structure* Indian tradition than IMS (*assumption only). It was a very challenging experience to sit that long with my thoughts, back pain, a nervous bladder only breakfast and lunch (no dinner or snacks), boredom, anxiety, fear, peacefulness, anger, sadness, despair, harmony….all of it and I really didn’t have the experience with meditation back then to do the course with the right kind of self-compassion. Nonetheless, I made it through and had moments where I truly felt myself coming home again.
Like so many or most, meditation can be really challenging for me and I’m admittedly sporadic in some seasons with my practice, but those experiences were sufficient for me to find it impossible turn away from myself and what I’d discovered within. It was just glimpses, but it peaked my curiosity. I don’t always stay with things, but meditation practice stuck for me and became a regular part of my life. My enthusiasm waxes and wanes to some degree about it, I cannot help but to keep going back to the mouth of that cave and although the instructions with Vipassana seem elusively straightforward and simple, it really is a challenging art and as a kindergartner of meditation, I’m still scribbling with crayons on the cave walls, like I’m doing now.
I turned 35 on the day that retreat ended and I’ll always treasure the birthday card my oldest sister sent me that year. We grew up together so she knew better than anyone what I was facing by going inward and shining a light into my subconscious. “I love you, brother. That had to take a whole lot of courage ” it read.
My wife had a really hard time on that retreat and tried to leave the 2nd day. She stuck it out for me, hoping that by the time we could talk after it was over that I would have gained a lot from it and healed some. I snuck a piece of paper that I’d torn into the shape of a heart across to the female side of the dhamma hall and sat it on her cushion before a group sit. 9 years later and she’s only a few times broken her vow to never meditate again. I’m so grateful to her for not leaving me there though. She had some powerful insights about what mattered most to her when everything was stripped away and we included those experiences in our wedding vows.
I can say wholeheartedly that meditation practice has saved my life but it’s also enhanced my relationship with my family. I have lost friends though as many destructive habits and addictions started to atrophy but what changes DID happen in my life were slow and over a 9 year period now. I still get very confused and stuck and depressed. I’ve carried a lot of things with me down into the deep and there has been a lot of things I struggle to let go of, but I know I’ll have to eventually anyway. Some passages are way too narrow for me to drag this heavy ego along. I also bear down hard on my pain and instead of naming dragons, I’ve whopped some of them with large sticks and gotten myself into treacherous places but I know now that the way out is very often through. What draws me toward this class with Tara and Jack is their awareness and sensitivity surrounding trauma. It is not wise or compassionate to pick big fights with yourself. It’s not skillful or loving to push hard against deep wounds and I keep struggling to learn that lesson.
What I find so fascinating about this exploration for me is that over the many times I’ve felt stuck or confused, if I can just hangout in that narrow part of the cavern for a while with patience, curiosity and intention, someone or something inevitably shows up to relight my torch. I loved hearing everyone’s inspirational person during that last Q & A. Buddha and Jesus or great teachers like Tara, Jack, Thich, Ram Dass that just inspire us to keep exploring and have committed their lives to the work. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been confused, burnt out, depressed about “progress” and shortly after I’ve almost given up, I’ve ran across the answer I’m looking for or just the spark of courage to light my way again. Most recently, the universe or karma stumbled me across talks by Jonathan Foust that have answered, assisted or soothed me through challenges.
There are so many beautiful souls from different traditions who I’ve been astounded to discover faced the very same challenges as I do each time I sit. For a long time I really believed that I was too broken to attain even modest benefits or strides toward true inner freedom. I’m not always a very calm person or a steady-Freddy as I like to call people who have it together. I’m kind of okay with that now though. I feel things deeply and that can be a gift and a burden. There are so many common snags and pitfalls and a wealth of wisdom to draw from and so many new things I’ve learned from just this course, particularly on self compassion. The biggest mistake I made early on was to go it alone. I never really had a community more than sporadically at retreats or serving during courses and that’s brought me big challenges in these explorations. I’ve not stayed connected to fellow meditators I’ve met and I don’t let many people get close. I don’t ask for help enough and I’ve felt kind of intimidated by my teachers so I haven’t reached out. I’ll never forget the first time I got to witness that teachers are very human too. A retreat had ended and the teacher who led it got really frustrated in the parking lot that someone had blocked her car in. I helped her back out and I got to back up my wrong notions that long time practitioners and teachers don’t get really frustrated at things too!
What really tuned me in to the incredible possibilities of turning inward was something I didn’t expect at all. I very naively thought somehow that I’d be becoming a different person or wise in the way we attach that word to an ego. What I soon started noticing though and it almost brings me to tears while writing this, is the invaluable wisdom all around me. In awareness…yeah, absolutely but also being aware and receptive to the people I might meet everyday. A lot of those times that I’d felt stuck and incredibly lost in my life, somehow a person would appear or an acquaintance would call out of the blue and they’d not be a spiritual person at all but would say something so shifting for me or behave with complete kindness in a way that utterly changed my perspective entirely. It could be a coworker that normally I’d struggle to get along with or my mother who I’ve had a long troubled relationship with and I’d just all the sudden see their innate goodness, incredible resilience, their inner beauty beyond the conflict, their Buddha nature.
That has been without any doubt the surest sign that some small but beautiful transformation was at work. I somehow saw goodness and wisdom in others just every once in a while that shattered all the defenses around my heart. It’s not continuous for me at all, and maybe well rounded people feel that way most the time anyway. It doesn’t matter. I occasionally was able to see things differently and that was incredible to me. Most often it has been my amazing wife who will “never meditate again” that has delivered me from self doubt and despair with the kindest and most loving words of encouragement and support. I sometimes have minuscule but miraculous gaps in my inner critic or dialogue where real love or peace pours through. It just happens every once in a while, not often but often enough. I could never turn back after experiencing that. Can you imagine what that does to a cynical and pained person like myself? Maybe I just started to see more constellations instead of just the meaningless stars. I don’t think I’ll ever understand the full depth of that mystery but I’m so curious to explore it more.
Whether it’s a meditation challenge like this one where you find yourself struggling to sit for 5 minutes with your thoughts, or you head off to meditate in a cave in the Himalayas for 30 years, I want anyone who has made it this far reading my blatherings to receive that same encouraging message, echoing deep off those cave walls that was once sent to me. What you’re doing here takes a lot of courage and I hope something you shine your light of awareness on glistens with a curiosity that keeps you returning again and again to search the darkness in any way and measure you feel compelled. The very life that you are is flowing down there and if you listen closely, it’s cheering you on.
fartlosophies 