Caught up in motion
Swirling around
Sometimes you're standing still
On uneven ground
[Cornelia and Jane, by Yo La Tengo]
The celestial utopia, a spa for my all-over-the-place mind, a laundromat for the soul (wash it at a 100 degrees Celsius and you'll get rid of every stain). I took off to Finca La Luz, in Spain, hoping to enlarge that glimpse of peace I had learned to identify and managed to keep inside after my bike trip was over. Being in the presence of Saraswathi Ma, living in an ashram - that would be free peace; those would be overwhelming winds of love coming to cure me from every disease, past and future. Yes: let's go back to 1969 Woodstock, lots of music, everybody dancing and being crazy and walking and having flower-power fun.
Of course all of it was romantic Mariana swimming in the waters of caramel ignorance. No, awareness is not an item to be purchased. And just like psychotherapy yet a bit differently, the way into exorcizing ghosts out is never cheap. Not because they insist to stay - not at all. In the very end, I came into the learning that... yes, we all love our ghosts way too much to let them go that easily.
* * *
Ok, so here I am, at Finca la Luz. So let's start this meditation.
Sitting in the cushion, I quickly come to learn that to sit in silence, to live in the present means to be always fresh. Wow. To be fully aware and immersed in the here and now requires a level of abstraction of my prosaic life so radical that it almost feels impossible.
For this one who sits in silence is not staying there to contemplate the past, to surf into the waters of memory, to make plans, to imagine life, to think about my beloved ones. This one who sits in silence Now is almost like a space where the now happens by itself. This Now-Mariana does nothing but this: she sits to observe from the point of view of the unchanging/everchanging present the madness of being out of it all the time - and isn't it what everyday life's all about? Well, it is all easily seen, but it often feels a bit schizophrenic: am I getting nuts? Isn't it way too psychologically dangerous to divide yourself in two - the observer and the object who is observed? Am I imagining this all?
Experience answers, and I start to feel angry. I am angry with being here, angry because it is not fun as I imagined and everybody is silent all the time, and angry with ex-boyfriend who broke my heart and decided to follow me into coming to this ashram, angry with all other ex-boyfriends of my entire life and angry with myself for no being able to let it go. And specially I am angry because anger is such an ugly, horrible feeling that should not come here in my spiritual spa! Wasn't it supposed to be a cozy, sweet, painless sort of vacation from my busy everyday life?
***
In our bicycle days together, Judi once told me that in a long bike tour there's always a breakthrough moment. It's that decisive instant when your old settled "I" disappears completely and you become one with the tour itself in its ever present transience, and when you start to function by the day, no planning, and acts basically through intuition. Hers happened when she cycled Bolivia. Mine was in the desert of Aragón, and when it came it was so sharp that I remember thinking: "shit - she was right!".
I could say the same about ashram life and silent meditation.
So it happened that somehow one day I stopped being angry with anger, so anger was now not reacted to with more anger - it started to be observed. It was felt, too, and it was painful - but it was also observed.
And the shock was: Jesus Christ, there is so much anger here. I didn't imagine a little body like mine could store so much of it.
Not without feeling it, then a journey to the very heart of anger started. In sitting in meditation I observed that much of my actions in everyday life were actually reactions, and most of them structured through this very feeling of anger - sometimes hidden in some camouflage pretty smiley skirt, but usually there. As memory danced in front of me, I paid a visit to ancient events. I was not identified with then now: I was the observer. I could see the structure of anger down there. I felt ashamed and sad. The present anger with ex-boyfriend came many times, and I was then able to watch actual anger as it unfolded in the present. By watching it, I also watched my body reacting, the heartbeat going crazy, the thoughts and conclusions popping out, the shoulders contracting, my cheeks getting warm.
Well, my friends... A journey into the depths of those cupboard feelings are much more like a week on living hell than a fairytale spa.
***
I came then to the very obvious and simple realization that the anger feeling was there because it was my own created way to face situations I didn't like. I was not forced to adopt it - it was a part of me, of the way this Mariana had lived in the world so far. There was nobody else to be blamed for it. This anger was (somehow) Me. But it was not real by itself. It was an expression and a part of my identity at once, and when I saw it in depth, and when I experienced it... Then I could see a little bit who Mariana was, but with distance. The anger was acknowledged, so it lost its mysterious, unknown power.
Do this experience: picture yourself in your mind. Now strip yourself from your most potent feelings - pick two or three. Strip yourself from anger, from kindness, from your dreams of future, from your desire to be/have this or that, from some particular resentment. What would be left, then?
As for me, I got to understand that no feeling is one-sided, no sharp marks are written in our perception of the world. And now? Should I let this anger go? Wouldn't that create a passive, submissive Mariana instead of the fierce, proud, strong one? I was afraid of letting anger goes, because that letting go would mean abandoning identity. And I am in love with that sense of identity which is anchored in this lifelong experienced sense of anger against that which I don't like. It gives me the identity "Mariana, the warrior".
When I started to let go, sometimes I felt I was falling from a cliff. Sometimes I felt I was being absorbed into a dark hole. Sometimes I feared I was going crazy and losing my mind. One day I realized anger was gone and I understood I had surrendered.
I felt spacious. I felt light. I felt like I had really fallen from a cliff and that I had not survived.
It was very good.
So this story does not have a conventional happy ending, because awareness is in itself a path of destruction. It is not painless. Good news is: all the pain is imaginary. You're standing still on uneven ground.
*"Cornelia and Jane", from Yo La Tengo's 2013 album "Fade".
** This was the last post of a series of three texts on my experience in "Finca La Luz", in 2013. "Finca" was a small ashram-like space in Andaluzia/Spain, where Saraswathi Ma offered her presence in satsangs between February and November, 2013. All these posts are written in deep gratitude for her, and dedicated to the beautiful friends I met there.
