Leaning over an abyss, a blackness into which I would topple, a nothing to swallow me whole. Close your eyes and breathe but I felt as if I was falling. At Vipassana I was held to some degree by the form and the room and the others and the person sitting up front, ten days silent when I wrote poems on my pillow, a pencil found beneath the bunk room doormat, a contraband passed on. But then we came home. I remember my husband having no trouble at all with the hour at morning and night, he’d sit, the picture of Buddha without the fat, still and smiling. But I had a tingling through my muscles telling me I was going to vomit any minute if I didn’t open my eyes and move. I rang the centre in Hereford, they advised me to try it lying down. It didn’t help at all. I felt suicidal. And so I stopped. I didn’t sit for many years, I don’t remember what got me into it again, I do remember feeling bad about it, being down on myself, thinking I wasn’t trying hard enough, I was lazy, a coward, an imposter. All this spiritual lark and you don’t meditate? I kept it hidden. I remember telling myself that anything could be turned to that frequency; walking, running, doing the washing up, that even this, writing, is a meditation of sorts, but I didn’t believe any of it. In my heart I said I had failed. And then I met my somatic experiencing woman who operates on levels I marvel at, who is the finest example of quantum healing, where science meets the Great Unknown, that I have come across. If childhood authority figures were not safe or not there, meditation will be an impossible task. It will feel dangerous. And there it was. My exact experience summed up in her careful words. Meditation frightened the hell out of me, it always had, and I’d always blamed myself for not being courageous enough to face it. But being a very courageous person, and now with the knowledge that my body, with all its resistance, wasn’t wrong, I tried sitting for one minute with my eyes open. That one minute has become three. I’ve tried four, it doesn’t work, I am frightened again. So, three it is and I sit on my mat and turn up for myself, and know that the body keeps the score. It’s learning with me that I’m not alone after all because I am there, sitting within the Great Unknown that is filled with stars and points of light like this, my beating heart.
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I love and deeply understand this. For the longest time I was terrified to meditate. (And this as a person who identified as spiritual, was profoundly drawn to all things spiritual, etc.) As soon as I closed my eyes I had the sensation that someone was going to run up and plunge a knife into the center of my back, although I could meditate in a wobbly little way if I was in a group.
In a different place now after a couple of decades+ but the panic was wild.
Three minutes is perfect and a triumph.
My god I felt this. I can't meditate traditionally. I meditate when I make bread or embroider. I can't sit in complete silence and I always felt like a failure. I'm learning to accept that my ways are different. I'm sure I would benefit from meditation but I just can't.