Writing from the Inside Out (20 page)

Doing this reflective work is a useful exercise for opening up to what is possible beyond your wildest expectations. Then, having stretched yourself, you may find that what you deeply want is already within your reach. Having strived, you will find it useful to be free of even the best expectations.

 

 

An image: The ringing of a bell in suspensionless space. Sound resonates evenly in all directions, inward and outward, unhindered. Not by any other object, not by space, and not by the bell itself.

You are in the position of that bell. Confront that wide openness, that unadulterated, unkinked honesty. The fear of being open beyond my sense of self is greater than my fear of death, because I can think of death as something that happens to me — being who I truly am requires that I am active in precisely the ways I most want to resist.

The more attentive I am, the more I come to recognize that I am that unattached presence in space. I have a name and a job and preferences and a physical body and everything else that I have. But what I have, I've been given, and the more I pay attention to what I am (rather than what I have), the more the image challenges my sense of self in the best of ways.

I mask this fear by limiting my view, attaching myself to ideas and people, and clinging to the matrix of what's familiar. Yet, no matter how successful I am, at the end of life, I will set aside all that I have. I confront this clear and open image as well when I press myself into uncertainty. In a song, or a moment of writing, or during Hatha yoga practice, I may reach something mysterious and fascinating, an image to which I have not been conditioned to react. Curiosity and passion lead me here, and my natural instinct is to reach for an idol of familiar framework. I don't want to feel out of place, or alone, or crazy. I look for security in whatever way I can find — I search for certainty.

Imagine that, during yoga practice, a person is holding a posture for longer than is comfortable. Her body is safe, but she feels unsteady. Feelings arise, and she feels prone to doing something linguistic with those feelings, like give herself a label. Perhaps she identifies with being a failure, and that label gives her some security by attaching to an internal object, a word, or a belief. Or, perhaps she blames her teacher, and she assigns her sensation to an external object. She wants to write something, but she chooses instead not to write, because she is attached to the certainty that she doesn't have anything to write about, or it wouldn't be any good, or it wouldn't come out right the first time. It gives us a bit of security, but it makes us suffer.

The practice of free-form writing asks that we get rid of these senses of security. When we release false sources of security, we make room for what is already there to be expressed. We feel love and something abundant beyond love. We feel how spacious and sufficient the present moment is, and what a gift it is to be alive, to have the opportunity to make the world a better place, to make art, to be aware, to live as this specific human being, whoever that might be.

Relaxing into that openness, into the support of spaciousness, we are most free to live fully and to act in a way that naturally expresses who we are, which goes beyond our own capabilities for knowing.

Deeply feeling that openness, simply being present to what is before us, something happens, and we feel supported after all. In the overwhelming and awesome spaciousness of pure being (a place with no name to confirm our existence), we can relax and realize we have lost nothing. We are not our moment-tomoment collection of sensations and beliefs. They depart with the movement of time. We are also not our actions. They are the expression of cause and effect for which we are most responsible. We do not need to be partial to what we understand to be the self. Our self-shape enables us to be as we are and practice as we can. But we are not that shape, and the ego is not the doer. Through the practice of poetry, we can overcome the self and then be enabled to function as our own best friend rather than as our own obstacle and enemy.

All this self-shaping is happening to us on some level all the time. The Tibetans believe that within each second there are 600 opportunities to experience self-realization. This internal battle is noticeable when we encounter something new, before we're even able to exclaim or remark internally. When writing, we discover a freshness or an intricacy in each image, which at first may feel too large or too small to conceptualize. The unsupported image offers no comfort or familiarity.

We cling tightly to what we think we have, whether it's valuable or not. We need to know who we are and where we are, but the ego is blind, and so we must admit that it does not always know what is best. When we train it not to be motivated by the fruits of action (or the fruits of inaction), the ego releases its grip on steering toward what justifies it and away from what threatens it, and there becomes room to experience something really wonderful.

Look for the unsupported image in ordinary thoughts, sensations, and events, and you'll find it everywhere. Finding it wholeheartedly, you'll be overwhelmed with a feeling of devotion and compassion. When you feel pressed beyond your comfort zone, just beyond your range of expertise, you are moving toward a divine experience to which you should open yourself. It is a place you cannot go expecting results. Going there, you lose the purpose that led you there.

 

 

Criticism is fine when it's in the proper place, which is afterward. Then, be as critical as you can be and don't try to fool anyone. Put yourself in a place so critical that you recognize that fooling anyone would be failure. That place trims the wool away from the eyes.

The main obstacle to doing what's right is self-interest. The critical wisdom that transcends this urge is coming to understand that we don't always know what's best for us. We are part of a whole, and the more we come to recognize that, the more we naturally offer what is ours to give. Recognizing yourself in others, you naturally respond to their needs. As we come to better understand ourselves, we also come to understand the needs of others as sometimes being not in their best interest. Learning more about ourselves, we also are forced to admit the limits of our knowledge and, as such, we must admit that we cannot fully say what is best in all cases for all people.

Yoga philosophy provides the answer to why most people fear public speaking worse than death. From the standpoint of the ego, authentic expression requires integrity that reaches beyond our comfort zone (and challenges our self-concept).

The author-self concept is good when it's overcome. I associate the author-self with a given persona — coffee drinker, wry, prone to depression — and it behooves me to open beyond this limited view. Strange that it should be hard. Even the appearance of the divine is something we can fear worse than death. Just catching a glimpse of a divine experience through our practice can be deeply unsettling.

When in a writing marathon, we have to move forward. Sometimes we fight the desire to stop and rest. And sometimes we fight the desire to be continually in the flow of things. Often we're cautious to confront something that we close ourselves off to, either by numbing out or by holding the pose by force of will — in either case, losing the ability to be present and aware without judging, allowing the experience to flow through us.

There's no way to “win” at writing. Even being really productive or great with words may not lead to a more intense experience. If it's easier for you to do things a certain way, you will probably want to challenge that, to shake it loose and always be riding just beyond the edge of your experience. That's where growth happens.

Push yourself too far, and you risk weirdness, exhaustion, and perhaps even disillusionment — taking on the wrong stuff or more than you're ready for. Don't push yourself enough, and you're likely to find a false sense of comfort or esteem, a pride that isn't perhaps warranted.

In some sects of ancient Tantra, groups of practitioners would gather in a room to meditate, and then their guru would bring into the room an object of extreme desire. The guru would instruct the meditators to watch. After enough time had elapsed for the meditators' attention to get thoroughly hooked and entangled, the object of their desire would be removed, and they would be told to resume meditation. On one hand, they would have brought an intensity into their meditation that could be very useful. On the other hand, the practice hadn't been built up to deal with such a thing, to balance it out. In other words, the meditators hadn't first cultivated a strong sense of nonattachment. There wasn't so much ground to stand on with the additional energy from viewing the object of their desire. These tantric sects eroded not long after they had been practiced, but these exercises relate to stories that occur to us every day. When beginning a piece of writing, we may project expectations about the finished work. It can be built up too much before it has even taken form.

Continual practice is hard. To help overcome the pride of such a practice, I make sure I keep myself just beyond the edge of my own expertise. To help balance out the sense of shame that can arise from constantly feeling challenged, I do what I can to remind myself of the increased rewards brought by the practice, and reaffirm that I am open to feel whatever is necessary to achieving freedom and growth. And I let the feelings — good or bad — flow through me rather than finding sticky resonance against an internal story.

Any practice that takes a person away from the ordinary and exposes her to a wealth of its own concepts, terms, and traditions will feel different or foreign. It's important to transcend the duality of different or same, and instead consistently serve a personal truth.

You may have some fear of taking a class or of going on a retreat that differs in some way from what you're used to; then, having braved the experience, you may have some fear of returning to the community. This fear often turns into a false embrace, in which it becomes important that, upon returning to the community, we are seen as different than before, as significant from everyone else. There are times when it's best to stand up for one's beliefs, and there are other times when to do so would be offensive, either for one's environment or with respect to how the beliefs are being conveyed — perhaps as a totem or achievement, when, in fact, the truth only emerges through actual lived experience, and not by being recognized by others as being one way or the other.

I look in a mirror and see the visual reflection of my body at a given time. I look into the mirror a moment later and see roughly the same image, unless I've made some dramatic change to my appearance. I look into the mirror a third, fourth, fifth time, and the pattern that tends to emerge is that I won't necessarily see myself each moment; instead, I am basically just being reminded of what I already know.

It's good that things persist, because that resolution allows us to grow and improve the more we practice. It's good also to know that we often take for granted that things are the same when, in fact, nothing is really exactly the same from one moment to the next. Some food that your body is digesting has made its way a little farther through your system. Your heartbeat has been doing its thing; you've taken new breaths. What doesn't seem important to us gets rounded off into a place we open up to when practicing poetry or yoga.

Imagine looking into a mirror and also seeing the images of how you looked years ago, how you'll look in the distant future. Which one is the right representation of you? Is it truer as you proceed, or are you moving away from the soulful representation of you?