Yes, I do struggle.
Yes, I don’t know.
And yes, here it is again: “Hello darkness my old friend”* – and the blank page, my salvation…
I recently finished a ten-day Vipassana course and I have to say that it shattered something inside of me to an immeasurable degree. It shook me and my, still so precious, existence. It shifted my perspective on basically everything I have ever done in a subtle and at the same time fundamental way I had never experienced before.
Don’t get me wrong: I know that everything I have ever done is perfect. My past is perfect. My future is perfect. And the presence is what I still long for. And probably this is what made me sign up for the Vipassana course.
In a brief conversation I had today, this person said: “We always have expectations. Otherwise we wouldn’t do a thing.” This was very interesting for me to hear. And it reminded me of how I am creating black and white stories around what “proper” detachment should look like….
It’s OKAY to have expecations. All is okay…. Anyway, later on you will eventually get the point (maybe, maybe not;).
Sooo. What did change through Vipassana? I realized how much I was (and still am!) searching for ‘something’ outside of myself. Yes, I investigate, I reflect.
Life forced me inward several times in my life. To be much more accurate MY PAIN forced me inward, because when the pain became unbearable I had to find resources inside – just to find out that THEY ARE THERE! There ARE resources!!
I internalized, but most of the time I analyzed:
And that is the point. At the end of the day I was always looking for an abstract answer. I was, unwillingly, looking for “an easy to digest” answer – an answer that is still, more or less, acceptable by my upbringing or by my conditioning, my inner voices and internal judges…
It sounds kinda cool to move through the dark night of the soul. It sounds impressive to move kundalini energy. It sounds amazing to “walk the camino”. Nothing more and nothing less.
I confess: I like “the sounds of it”… Transformation. Healing. Yoga and so on.
So. What Vipassana did was that it stripped allll these cozy wordings, definitions, explanations, RITUALS and STORIES off me….
I could finally breathe again.
Vipassana does not serve the answer on a golden platter. It does not give constructive feedback or valuable advice.
‘Gotama showed the path…,’ they say. Yes. Figuratively. “The path” is nothing conceptual. It is nothing logical. It is nothing to map out or to comprehend. It is nothing to understand or to study. It can only – and ONLY be walked. One-step-at-a-time. One sensation after another after another after another….
To be fair: There is no freakin’ path (no offence). There is only life itself. And when I say life I don’t mean “this one life”…. Not at all. There is life vibrating through our cells. There is life sprouting from our veins.
There is no such thing as “the core of our being”. There is only being.
It’s the conceptualization, the intellectualization that is keeping me trapped within my own mind.
Vipassana forced me to open the gate. Or did it rip apart the fence? I don’t know and it honestly does not matter.
Vipassana let life within me run free. And this left traces in my consciousness.
There is some novelty, a new realization awakening within myself…
The purges have been purged. And now life is urging to move me the way I’m supposed to move…. And now writing this down here I can feel the ‘intellect’ creeping in asking: “What are you talking about?”
To use the words of Satya Narayan Goenka, one of the leading teachers of the method of Vipassana: “There is only flux and flow.”
Nothing to suppose. Only to surrender.
And today I do surrender to darkness, because darkness knows more than me. It grounds me. It helps me grow if I let it….
* Simon & Garfunkel, 1964 😉