For years I had been meditating the way a dying woman might pray; desperately reciting mantras and prayers and waiting for holy light to relieve me of myself.
By the time I came to the Advita teacher, Adyashanti, after years of gentle re-direction back to the body with Thay, I was more receptive to his kind of 'self-inquiry' instruction.
He said: take a deep question, one that your own soul really longs to have answered - beyond words - and ask it in meditation.
It seemed that my life had been an endless tug of war between holding on and letting go, without knowing quite what to hold on to or what I was willing to let go of. So I began with the question, ‘what is surrender?’
I asked that question in meditation for years. I sat down in my meditation room in the blue dark of morning, and I dropped this question into the cells of my body. I exhaled this question…
What.
Is.
Surrender…….?
And I felt into this question as an embodied inquiry. Where is there holding on? (In all the little catches of my muscles; in the pinch at the back of my neck; in the muscles of my hands; around my heart, which feels sometimes solid like a plate of armour and sometimes so tender it is terrifying). I felt into the modulations of these constrictions and openings as energetics always in movement with the shifts and currents of any day. I watched how they moved on days when thoughts told me good things, on days when thoughts told me bad things; days when the morning woke in an arc of blue and days when the sky pressed down on me like a thumb.
Through this bodily sense, I felt a kind of intelligent answering, as though my being could respond, ‘This. This is surrender.’
In such moments I felt my attention drop out from my tight skull and fall into the base of my body. Or I might feel something in the coat-hanger tension of my frame shudder into softness. Sometimes it was more of a feeling, as though, sitting there breathing in the darkness, I was giving away everything that I held onto; held together; held apart. I felt the palms of my hands turn upwards and soften. Sometimes there was the ghost of a smile and sometimes tears. All this, was surrender. And this is how meditation taught me.
And, at times I was pretty pissed off with myself for having chosen this existential question! Because it seemed that, having made this contract with life: ‘I will investigate what is surrender and you, Life, will show me,” event after event was now designed to provoke surrender. Which of course, means I now have to let go, like it or not.
So there was the lesson of letting go of being seen as ‘a good person” (a dear attachment of mine) when taking an authentic path meant being judged by others. There was the lesson of surrender when I developed a condition in my eye that caused frequent and severe attacks of pain, just in the moment when the body let go into sleep. ‘How do you surrender now?’ life seemed to ask, and now?!
Still, I was willing to follow the question. For example, the time - actually the several times - I went to sit in meditation in the midst of fury with my partner.
Wow, do you ever feel the energy of holding on when you sit in the fire of ‘being right’ and condemning the other person.
Yet it was actually fascinating to observe that at work in my system (and genuine interest is the true friend of meditation). And always, always I would come to this moment, as breath and silence softened in and around me, where I just let go. I didn’t get to an analytical breakthrough where I saw who was right and who was wrong. Something in me just let go.
I’d call it love. I’d say that sitting there in the heat and self-righteousness of my own anger, was a first act of love, of gentleness, of tender inquiry with myself. And receiving this awareness-as-love penetrating into the rigid thought-forms and the constricted energy-forms dissolved them, like aspirin in water. So a moment just arose when, as though surfacing from turbulent water, it was simply over, and It (whatever ‘It’ was at the time) just didn’t matter anymore. The brittle little kernel of anger had cracked open.
Sometimes this is such a painful experience – how my little inner fists cling to being right! – that it causes me to cry. Letting go of my anger, the tight coat I have pulled around me, I feel exposed, naked even…there’s no position to hold to, and the dispersed energetics seem to float, unanchored, as open as the breeze. And this can feel intensely vulnerable and I guess the tears are an expression of this.
What can be more vulnerable than to love? And loving, to have no position to stand in – love as love itself, which stands nowhere, being everywhere?
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