I just got off the meditation cushion and like after many sessions I have the inspiration to write.I was meditating upon the teaching of no-self in particular today and after a while I felt this extreme relaxation that sometimes comes when I focus my attention on the lack of an inherent self. This state of calm comes with a feeling of slight floating and a sensation that my body has melted beyond it's frame and merged with the continuous chain of molecules in space and time. I feel as if I am apart of a firm yet flexible wall where I can not tell at what point my body ends and the rest of the world begins. This experience is by no means ever present when I sit and it isn't something to attach too. However, it is always a beautiful, welcome, hands-on lesson in inter-connection and losing oneself into the vast yet comforting ocean of emptiness or no self.
Today is a very windy day and I am enjoying the commotion it has created. I use to become anxious with the wind (as I think I have mentioned here before). It use to anger me because it forced my carefully crafted world of "me" into flux. With mindfulness, however, I have come to welcome it as a visible reminder and agent of change. It helps remind me that change is a good thing. Without the changing winds there would be no seeds scattered to implant in fertile soil. Without the winds of change rain clouds would never empty their liquid beauty upon those seeds to grow into cherished plants to feed us.
I also see wind as symbolic of blowing the toxins of the "self" out of our minds. It is as if it is the very breath of Inter-being blowing away the dualistic boundaries of separateness to scatter our habit energy to be burned away in the freedom of emptiness or no self. Emptiness being liberating because in that state we are no longer bound by the constraints of the ego. Or "self" which seeks to imprison everything and everyone into categories or "jail cells" out of ignorance and fear which ultimately leads to all of our suffering. This example of the prison really helps me understand the beautiful gift of emptiness/no self. Because if I see myself as trapped in a cage (ego self) then I want to do everything to free myself from that cage so that I might reunite with my family and friends (the state of inter-being of the Higher Self). Seeing the freedom in emptiness and change is Right View or Buddha mind. This is because in emptiness we see things as they really are. The blurry glasses have been removed.
What have we to fear if we embrace change as a gift?
I hope some of this makes sense. It does in my head but isn't that where the problems lie in the first place? Ha!!
~Peace to all beings.
