Love Note #3: You Are What Nature Is

Dear hearts -

The silence or stillness of our consciousness has no movement. Have you noticed? It is like an empty sky stretching forever, holding everything, uninvolved in it all. When we are lucky enough to experience this, it can feel tremendously peaceful. Entering an old growth forest or a cathedral, we might sense the depth of this holy silence.

Within the stillness of our consciousness, things move. Birds fly, fans spin, things grow and rise and fall and shimmy. And in our bodies, despite sitting in meditation and touching this stillness, heart beats, breath moves rhythmically in and out, blood pumps, and all the cells in our bodies contain probably millions of tiny micromovements as life does what it does.

I like to call resting in the silence of consciousness "zero" and being the math geek that I once was, I like to call the zero each of us is generally capable of "relative zero." I say that because there is no way for the body to be at the absolute zero of consciousness - it has to move to live. And over time, with practice, our relative zero approaches absolute zero but can never reach it. We chill and chill and chill until we mirror the harmonious marriage of stillness and movement that we see in nature.

Here is the simple movement of the natural: breath, heartbeat, breeze, wave. Sitting by the ocean or a stream, sinking into the silence of consciousness, the body relaxing, only the natural movements remain, and those movements start to feel holy. Dogen writes about this:

The moon reflected

in a mind clear as still water

even the waves, breaking

are reflecting its light.

Yet we are filled with clench and unmet grief, anxiety that floats up to the mind and makes it scamper this way and that. Human! The point of practice, and embodiment work, is to not only learn how to stay relatively peaceful within all the movement, but how to resolve the unrest so that we are as nature is - simple consciousness with the movement of the natural.

The ancient Buddhist writers talk about the disturbed pond, and how meditation slowly stills the pond - the silt settles and the water is clear. This is the process that happens as we meditate over time and meet what lives in us. But we don't come upon this silence and deeply resting in it by forcing and we don't come upon it overnight. This is likely why it's called "the pearl of great price" - because it's not something we get to live simply by wishing it were so.

That your mind is busy is human. That your body has unresolved anxieties and griefs is human. We live in a culture that disturbs and interferes with our natural easeful ways and leaves us with insides that are out of balance. Sitting and witnessing and meeting over time helps the system to come to rest. "Being with" and letting the energies unwind themselves can be challenging to the revving engine of our desires, but full rest is not purchased by doing. Even the meeting and healing of trauma is much more a yin activity of feeling and meeting than it is a yang activity of getting somewhere.

Mercy to the impatient. Mercy to the forceful. Mercy to the one who longs to be pervaded by peace and is beset at every turn with the chaotic. (Free guided meditation on mercy here.) Here we have to give up our destination of perfect peace and turn toward life as it is. It is as it is for good reason and it has an integrity. It wants to be met on its own terms and known and accompanied so that it can work itself out. Whether it appears so or not, it is moving toward rest in its own way.

The power and energy behind the natural (the Tao) can be trusted. Breathe. Feel. Notice. It's not up to you. Nature is moving toward harmony, even if it has fits and whorls on the way. It takes a while for the rings in the pond to still after a stone is thrown.

Much love to all of you.

Jeannie

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