23 and 24 June, 2022.

Two days, two meditations.  Yesterday I could experience nothing but my own stray thoughts.  I don’t think it was a particularly challenging or stressful day; no particular anxiety or fear or anger or desire dominated the threads of self that kept bleeding in from both sides of the emptiness I was trying to experience.  I listened to the Tibetan bowls as best I could, but even their calming sounds became inaudible.  I rose frustrated, more tired than when I settled down. 

Today, from the first moment, the sense of emptiness, of freedom from self, was almost instant.  I make no claims for its depth, for its meaningfulness; all I can say is that I experienced with great pleasure a freedom from those very contaminants of mindfulness that defined my meditation the day before.  The bowls resonated, now, in that empty chamber of being that I hope for when I meditate, that place of silence that may approximate the conditions of non-attachment and non-action that I seek.  I was almost immediately refreshed.  I cheated: I made no effort to reach the twenty minutes of Western Standard Meditation Time (see Rinpoche Tibetan Book of Living and Dying), and I expect I meditated for no more than fifteen or sixteen minutes.  Yet I rose refreshed, feeling stronger, fuller in being. 

I have no explanation for the difference, but one fact seems noteworthy.  Yesterday I was kneeling, as usual.  Today, I risked sitting cross-legged once more, though with ample cushioning to prevent the harm that the position did last time I attempted it.  I was in a disciplined position but without pain.  I continue to feel that the body’s energies are able to make a circuit when one is cross-legged (or indeed in the lotus, though I never have been) that it cannot complete with the body in any other posture.  Might this have facilitated a happier state of meditation today?  Perhaps.  But it mustn’t become a strategy I rely on in future.