In my practice, I love when I’m standing there and I deeply relax, and then relax further.  Sometimes I get so relaxed I almost fall asleep for a moment, and then in that softening, somehow my firm ideas suspend, and this kind of innocent vulnerability emerges. It’s like I’m walking into a blank prairie. I’m touching something for the first time. This nascent place, not an idea, but the very thing itself, finally touching this, or rather being moved by it, the core of the event…  It’s the place I’ve needed to feel but I couldn’t touch consciously, and then my body opens in this new way because I’ve dropped into a place beyond good and bad.  This energy field we call self has sunk into a more connected awareness. That’s what I love.  Feeling deeply connected to something beyond my consciousness.  Beyond my moral idea of how I should be.  This gives me great faith that all of this practice is beyond culture, beyond technique.  Beyond any of my good or bad ideas or intelligence or stupidity. I feel like some wild transparent naked ascetic, standing there breaking all the rules, aligning with the one encompassing inevitable truth.

Love embraces me in this place of letting go into this unknowable directive force. I’ve let down my guard.  I’m barren to the moment. And yet in that surrendering comes another type of light. It feels like grace. The big energy comes not through efforts, but becoming transparent to it.  It reminds me so clearly that none of this is about me or my insights or skill or talent at all.  It is always there. It is beyond a self, something much more interesting, exalted, basic and wholesale.  It’s what I love most.  

*These are little mini reflections from our January Month-long online intensive.  It’s been wonderful, with sincere practitioners joining in from all over the world.