Tuesday, June 4, 2013

In the now

I got a cavity in my wisdom tooth filled two weeks ago, the morning after my birthday. It was unpleasant, but I'm still feeling an element of gratitude for part of the experience. After the dentist fitted my mouth with a dental dam and a lot of hardware, I didn't have much to do besides lie there.  And imagine how things could go wrong. So of course I did. It didn't hurt, but it could hurt, and the anxious mind was right there.

After calming myself, working on deeper breaths, ramping myself up again, and repeating a few times, I eventually found myself in a state of calm. An unexpected feeling of peace washed over me, which nearly totally extinguished the anxiety. In retrospect, it felt quite a lot like I imagine George Fox's Ocean of Light washing over the Ocean of Darkness. It felt like a presence, and that all would be just fine in the end.

Of course everything was fine. And the next evening I was starting to worry about something at work, and realized I was ramping myself up a bit. And I was able to recall and re-establish just about the same sense of peace.

This last weekend in Meeting, I realized I had characterized the feeling as "relax, everything will be OK." But a more accurate sense is actually, "relax. Everything is OK."

This is a bit of a pattern for me; I spend so much time planning and thinking about the future that I ignore where I am right now. This blog post comes after sitting and meditating on a feeling I woke up with- a sense of joy at the thinness of separation between the worlds. (Which worlds? I'm not sure. Pick your favourite you'd like to be near, I suppose.)

And perhaps be in the now- with nothing but a thin separation separating you from it.

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