Let the World Come to You
Last night I was doing a short meditation on Glo by Tias Little (How Speed Gets Trapped in the Body), and in it Tias said something that made me feel wonderful.
Sidenote: I have a sensor I use from Heartmath (https://store.heartmath.com/inner-balance/) which encourages me to find heart/brain coherence, and I was using this as I listened to the meditation because I like to test whether this sensor is just a bunch of hooey or if it can really tell how my heart and brain are doing. Red means you aren’t in coherence, blue means your close, and green means GOOD JOB, COWBOY/GIRL!
During this meditation I was in green 88% of the time. That’s an unusual amount for me—it’s usually lower. I felt calm. I felt flipping awesome, really.
I’ve been working at slowing down, at feeling good in my skin, and there are days when meditation feels like wild skating—I know I’m supposed to relax, to sink into stillness, but my brain is driving like a maniac through the events of the day and the meditation feels like trying to keep a spastic child still with a paper clip. Inept craziness.
But the meditation wasn’t like that last night. It was like floating out-of-body. These are the times that keep me coming back to the cushion (or the couch—I’m one of those people who likes to lie down when she meditates). My tongue was relaxed. My eyes were relaxed. My diaphragm. I was, as Tias said, “empty and luminous.”
Afterwards, I thought about how in general I focus again and again on my guts, trying to ease the perpetual tension I carry there by deep breathing, by trying to relax, and how it almost never works. My guts are perpetually in the state of someone just punched me, and that means my brain is stressed because the vagus nerve is traveling from my guts to my brain telling it there’s trouble.
It’s so weird that relaxing is one of the hardest things to do!
But last night Tias said something that got my guts to relax. He quoted a a Zen koan: Chasing after the world brings chaos. Allowing it all to come to me brings peace.
I focused on my heart, and I imagined it was a magnet that draws the world to me, a magnet that allows the world to come to me. A magnet that brings me peace. I thought about how I thought I was supposed to chase after the world. I thought about how I thought I was always supposed to be striving, to be pushing myself even when I felt word down.
My heart felt electric. It felt beautiful. The amazing thing was that, without even thinking about it, my guts relaxed. By focusing on my heart, I softened my abdomen, and by softening my abdomen, I got my brain to take its foot off the gas pedal.
Heaven.
If it’s true that what we practice grows stronger, how can we lose if we practice letting the world come to us? Or maybe a better question is, what could we lose?
