These three early entries in my journal capture in part the spirit and questions with which I approached a renewal of my meditation practice well over a year ago. What a different world it was when I began: Cuillin alive and thriving, Maggie in full health, my teaching life having just finished. Meditation is easy, and shallow, when one’s “suffering” is theoretical.

6 May 2022.

The world without you is truer than the world with you.

Your death will eliminate one false version of the world.

Meditation must not bring you to an inner condition identical to death.  Enlightenment is living.

19 May 2022.

One of the most powerful questions I have been faced with in my readings: what is the “you” you experience in your random thoughts that come and go and trouble you as you meditate?  But more important: who is the “you” that is in between or beyond those thoughts?  Are both equally you?

21 May, 2022.

Difficulty today.  The scattering mind would not yield.  In between I was quiet, but my breathing retained that upper limit, that upper airlock, and would not break through.  I was quiet, but then several seconds would go by in which I was lost to thought.  I thought of my hara, and for a moment that released me, for a moment only until I thought again of my hara.  My hands were in the recommended relation to one another in my lap, pushing down into my lap until I shared their gravity and began to droop forward.  So I consciously effortfully lifted them and held them in the air, the muscles of my arms tense.  This helped.  But it was late in Meditation Western Standard Time,* and nothing much that was real had happened when I breathed with relief my last of fifty breaths.

*Sogyal Rinpoche’s gently mocking phrase in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying