First there’s my experience of sitting, which is one of compression, claustrophobia – not 100 per cent of the time, but quite a bit of it. My impression of my childhood is of too much sitting still and being quiet: I suppressed a large part of what was most real and most valuable in myself. I supressed my passion and my responsivity. I suppressed my life and my warmth and my humanity. I often experience sitting meditation as a recapitulation of that suppression, and I want to explode, I want to howl, I want to weep, I want to laugh, I want to dance. I want to protest to the world that movement, not stillness, is my natural expression. Movement is where I find delight and fullness, is where I find pathways to something that is already here and at the same time beyond what is here – or through and between what is here, like the picture you can only see if you slide the black paper slots over the image in the right way.
And that leads me on to the cultural thing: the emotional ‘flatness’ that appears to my, Western, sensibility to characterise Buddhist cultures. I cannot make myself this way – and I sometimes feel that I’m being tacitly asked to – when my gateway is bliss, and the road to this gateway is all the emotions: sorrow, rage, grief, abundant joy ... It seems to me that there is room for these on the Hindu path and the Sufi path – more than room: they are themselves an aspect of the path – in a way that I feel they aren’t quite in Buddhism.
Sitting under the walkway on the banks of the Thames the other week, I received something like a personal mantra: ‘The world doesn’t need you to be a hero; it just needs you to dance’. I think that finishing the ngondro and making myself sit still are heroic. And it’s paradox, yes, because when I received the mantra I was sitting. And here’s where sitting works for me: when it happens in nature, when it’s spontaneous, when it’s the pause in the rhythm of the dance, the halt in the beat. When there’s no compulsion. Then it feels organic.
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As I read this a few days later, I can see how I am at war with myself, how there’s no compulsion to do anything or be any particular way except the compulsion that I'm imposing upon myself. This changes the perspective but it doesn’t make me feel the conflict any the less. And maybe this is just my own particular way of creating an explosion.
