Day Seventy-six

I notice many judgmental thoughts. It is difficult to be myself, even for a second. I do not know who I am, but then I watch myself and I come closer. I can let myself touch things deeply. I am carried along by the whole world and I am grateful.

Day Seventy-five

I am holding the stone but trying to let go. Instead I hold on loosely. I bring my attention loosely, gently. I try to be what I am, like the stone does.

I look to uncover the secret mechanism that is craving. It is there following feeling, and before, with contact, and within the senses. It seems all pervasive; at the very root of thinking. And so watching for craving; feeling for craving, is difficult, but it is the only other activity besides craving. Can I watch feeling without craving? Ah, that is watching; watching craving; craving is defined as not watching; not watching builds the self; the self is built of sleep.

In the glory of touching, of feeling, of contact, of forms that rest alone, I return to what I am.

Day Seventy-four

My perception of the world around me and of the stone is flawed by my presumption of its independence. I desire it to be a certain way, I dislike it, or pay little attention to it. Sometimes, the harder I try to 'just feel' it, the more entangled I get in many thoughts and feelings.

In any of these cases, I 'pick up' not just the stone but a delusion of myself as separate from it. It feels like I cannot see without this artificial barrier, but that is just doubt. The form is there and my skin contacts it. Immediately I have a story, not so much about the stone, but about myself. They are interwoven.

I haved a perception of the mind in the same way as thinking about those things and 'trying' to get peaceful, more aware. These are just perceptions and feelings that lead to a delusion of the way things are. With what is the way things are peceived? Simply with the mind of unwrapping, of letting go. I could say that to be spiritually healthy in this exercise, I need the stone to be calm, but there is no stone there, no exercise, no spirit.

Day Seventy-three

There have been difficult sessions with the clients I counsel; one in particular with a heavy past. I cannot go to the place he is, it feels to risky, too unsettling.... he is in my head as I sit today. I thought about how all beings have been my mother; those close to me, those in the past, those who only are seen for a short while. There is a call to be close to all of them.

If they have all been my mother, cared for me, that makes the possibility of some exchange of energy more possible; I can be closer because there is grace. As someone said, 'how little grace is earned and how much given....".... that is the situation with our mothers.

And not even so much that we have not earned the grace through our own efforts, but that we do not need to, we need not protect ourselves so much, there is the experience of such grace here available; there is only a series of mistaken angles in ourselves and others, only a tangled flame of craving above the lake of acceptance; this lake has been our refuge many times.

I shift from trouble to joy in release from this trouble I have made.

Day Seventy-two

The stone may be as much me as any other part of me. When it is touching my fingers, I cannot find the touching point. When I look for that point, I find at first, only my skin impressed upon the stone. But after a while, I feel the pressing of bone under the skin, and feel the surface of the stone. The surface impresses not just upon my skin, but upon my bone, upon my arm, upon my body. But it is not the stone that impresses upon the bone, not the skin upon my arm, not my bone upon my body, but impulses that bear the seed of perception; combinations of combinations, the stone and the air, the gravity of the earth less the moon, the temperature born of the sun and the cool dark of the house; everything is here, and none of it can be captured or assigned a cost. At the same time, none of it can be denied; and the true relationship of all things is there in the stone and my fingers, my stone and the fingers, the flesh upon bone of my parents and my children, my love and my lost.

Day Seventy-one

Barriers to meditation are created by me. They are mostly made of history; echoes of sense impressions and thoughts woven into new ones. I look at the difference between perception of touching and judgement about it. There is the stone (or the limitation of it in name), the feeling made of contact with it, and the perception of the feeling or the repeated stating over and over in my mind "this is the feeling". It seems to me that the 'picking up' of the feeling is the judgement; it usually moves quickly to a description in my mind of the stone and its feeling, based on older descriptions.

On the other hand, meditation doesn't work well in a thick fog; which is the other way to go, like not wanting to identify and pick up and instead sort of pretending not to know what feeling is. I feel that the feelings and perceptions are not a problem at all, neither are the volitions toward or away from them, nor the thoughts, but a subtle craving in them that relates to the description of myself. I find myself challenging the stone to a solidity battle.

Day Seventy

Life is hard for me to look at sometimes. Working with this stone, like life, seems unavoidable. I have it here, and life is all around. I could stay in bed all day, or make up stories about how things are. I could stop this blog and my meditation, but I'm committed to it. Besides, I do plenty of other things and few of them bring as much satisfaction. I bring my body and mind to meditation. They often seem in some disagreeable state to being quiet. . . .

Ah... that's it; it is not discomfort with the stone at all; it is not the avoidance of the stone, but of facing that which I am. In other words, my only real issue is accepting ME, whereby I can concentrate. I have tried many ways to go around me, but none of them work well. I am not in a disagreeable state at all, I'm only in my state. I have no reason to disagree with what is really here.