Photo by Holger Link on Unsplash
unpolished thoughts 12/20/2018
I love the quiet of morning.
Yet I still find it to be a struggle to get up early. There is work involved.
I’m trying to get to the place of enjoying the work.
Joy, as I understand it is different than happiness. It’s not the pursuit of anything. It’s the acceptance of each moment for exactly what it is. It’s gratitude for the experience.
When I finally started to understand what was meant by the idea of presence, I wondered how much of my life I had spent wishing that I was not experiencing the present moment, struggling against the unfolding of experience.
If I could add it up, I know it would total many years.
Now I practice presence intentionally – and I still find resistance everywhere.
It’s especially noticeable in those places where I need to break habits in order to get the thing I’m after.
(“The thing I’m after” – sounds like the pursuit of happiness again, something “better than” the here and now.)
For example, I’m unhappy that my body isn’t moving. Too many hours in front of the damn computer. So I will myself to get up, leave home, and go to the woods for a run.
The rhythm of exercise brings me into a new state. I am more present and alive.
And yet, it’s as if I’m surprised when I find that feeling.
Sometime before I got my butt out the door, I was fighting myself. Resisting breaking habit, the relentless drive to do more of the same.
There is perhaps nothing more deceptive than the illusion that the unfamiliar and the unsafe are the same thing. It’s something I come back to again and again in my teaching.
(In a sense, I guess that makes it comforting that I still fall into the trap over and over myself – more material to work with!)
In the end, the cool air on my heated skin, my pounding heart, the new and spontaneous ideas in my head – these magical experiences that comes with my run are always better than what I was resisting.
The previous battle between my dissatisfaction with being sedentary versus the complaints of my inertia now seems absurd.
So why isn’t the simple knowledge of “what I will gain” by getting outside enough?
Why do I leave it up to the crap shoot to see which of the two grumbling voices will win – the one that grumbles about moving and the one that grumbles about not moving?
What do I need to change so that I can simply orient to the aliveness I already know awaits me in the woods, and move towards my natural inclination?
I’m closer to this state with my morning meditation.
It wasn’t always this way, but now I just get out of bed in the morning and do it because that’s what I do. It benefits me and there is no internal voice complaining about the effort needed to attain that benefit.
In fact, “attaining the benefit” is no longer the point – at least not consciously. I might not be a Zen master just yet, but I have found something valuable that isn’t yet there in my current relationship to running.
I’ll call it momentum.
There is certainly a moment where forming any new habit requires simply buckling down and making the decision to interrupt the current pattern, come what may.
Until I get there, puzzling through these layers of resistance where you can see them makes it less comfortable for me to stick with my status quo.
My basic strategy is to make the discomforts that I put up with all the time more obvious to myself so they will stop seeming so normal.
Is it normal to keep choosing complaining over the the opportunity to feel more alive?
If I keep noticing what I am really doing, I know that eventually I will flip my switch. The wisdom in my body that runs much deeper than the voice producing these words will then step in to guide me with a firm hand.