Zen Mountain

I meditated for an hour this morning. The peace, the ease. I focused on manifesting health in my body where it needs it the most. I found myself grateful for warm blankets and sweaters, feeling my feet on the floor. A veritable master of mindfulness. I sat so high atop my perfect zen mountain.

And then the universe came for me. The last-minute work phone calls where people who audibly buzz with anxiety ask me pointed questions and try to manipulate my answers. The emails that tiptoe around what they really want, waiting for me to give it to them anyway. The dog and her chemo pills, the gloves and the handwashing, the bodily fluids. I look inside my body amidst all the things that unfolded in the hours after my meditation, and I see car bombs going off, debris everywhere, angry children running around with machine guns. I see all of that clearly and I use it as fuel to dump my chaos onto others. I reach out to several people to explain the atrocities committed against me on this day, this day of my inner peace. And they hug me, and they offer kind words of understanding, how dare the world, etc, etc. I look at my insides again, still apocalyptic, still explosive. I realize all of the chaos has left me at 3pm with no lunch, or water. So I sit. I eat. I listen to Mooji talk about overcoming the mind. I figure at a minimum his ponderings will serve to disrupt this anxious, angry signal vibrating through my body. He talks about the plane of transcendence. Transcending personhood, the I-ness of it all. “Consciousness creates the sense of a problem to experience transcending it.” This wakes me up. This is all part of my curriculum. In this body, at this time. My sense of having created the warzone inside of myself after being handed a few small matches hits me hard. My higher self has not done this out of spite or futility, but out of a deep desire for growth. “Look, here is a wound, heal it!” I am called to remember how easily I have forgotten that I am pure love. That we are here to meet god in all of his most distressing disguises. That suffering is purely optional. This is my biggest challenge to accept. Read any old entry here and you will see a being so full of trauma and pain that all she knew how to do was sustain that level of torture. To learn to opt out of suffering is my work. I realize that it doesn’t matter the earthly severity of what is happening around me, the mind will step in and create mountains of mole hills and to me everything is an Everest. But I now have lived experience of seeing beyond this plane. I met god last February in a deep meditation. I saw through what is just in front of me to what is the truth. And then back on earth, I watched my father die in June. I endured things that I would not have survived prior to the last year. I held his hand at the moment he dropped his body and I felt love everywhere. That moment was a choice to not suffer and instead to see the truth of what was behind the suffering. Now that I know this, I cannot unknow it. That it is possible at every turn. Not given. But certainly possible. I find myself all swirled up into tiny dramas of the day and it takes such monumental effort to stand up out of that muck and say, “I see.” To be so achingly human and so brilliantly divine is a gift we possess. It is an honor to fight in this battle. And every small moment that I remember my divinity is a victory that I feel my ancestors, the trees, the air celebrating.