God and the Soul are One

Is it so wrong....

To feel like I was not even fully alive before I gave birth to my son?

I had a rich, full, active and accomplished life pre-Bodhi.

I do not miss it.

Is it the medication I'm on? The medication, which I am currently in the process of weaning off of? The medication which makes me feel flatlined, ambivalent about the economy, not even worried that I'm paralyzed with fear, too paralyzed to dream or achieve my ambitions?

We'll see. Or it could just be that I'm sooooo tired. I have to battle the tamasic me. Here I am again. Arjuna again. On the battlefield of Life again.

Like I'm never not Arjuna.

I so enjoyed my own childhood. I am really delighted to share everything I can with him. I can't wait for him to know what a bluejay is. I was showing him the bees drinking nectar from the camellias yesterday. He has no idea what Star Wars is, who Jack Kerouac was, what it's like to ride on an airplane, what snow is like, how to draw a shark, how to make a whistle out of a blade of grass, how to give mouth to mouth to a gerbil, the pleasure of swimming in a clear lake, the thrill of riding a bucking, galloping horse, how awesome it is to do flips on a trampoline, the fact of the dinosaurs, the constellations, and so on and so on.

I always thought those moms who waxed rhapsodic about having children were pitiful and full of shit. Smarmy and smug. Phony. Sell outs. And now I'm one of them.

What do the Buddhists say? "We become what we resist."

Good thing I resisted this for so long. It is so much the sweeter for it, I think.

In the Bhagavad Gita it says to fully live your OWN dharma, and no one else's. I can see the temptation in wanting to compare and contrast the unfolding of my own life to another's, and I can also see the utter futility in that.

Learning to be a mother has shown me, more than any yoga practice or scripture ever could, how essential it is to release judgment. To know that everyone has their own unique path. That I am not privy to the details of the inner and outer lives of every person I meet, their special histories, family karma, past and present life triumphs and tragedies. So who do I think I am, anyway? I have been training my mind not to "go there;" it is incredibly easy to judge another's parenting style -- good or bad -- which of course points toward how much easier it thus must be to judge my own.

If we want peace for the planet, and I assume most of us do, we must begin by examining the battlefield of our own souls first. How many times a day will I look down at my belly and think I'm a piece of shit because it's fat? How many times a day will I choose to check my email instead of write my insights? How often will I have just a flicker of self-loathing, followed quickly by either a downward spiralling list of my failures or an ego flareup of how good I am at yoga despite an inconsistent practice at the moment, or how awesome I am when Bodhi behaves well for an hour at a restaurant?

I recently started up my meditation practice again. That is to say, my formal meditation practice. I've been practicing the meditation of karma yoga since my son was born, offering all that I do up in devotion. It's the only way I can make it through another pile of dirty dishes. But the sitting down in front of an altar, lighting the nag champa, closing the eyes, chanting and going within? That was my daily sadhana for many, many years. I think it served me well, all that chi and prana in storage that I'd socked away, during these months of having to grab a minute here, a moment there, practicing open-eyed and breastfeeding meditation.

As the Gita says, IT ALL COUNTS. No gain is ever reversed.

But you can build up an awful lot of bad habits that soon outstrip the good ones. So my return to meditation is a triumph, albeit a quiet one. If you 've felt the earth changing recently, it is because I've started up again with a kind of sweet vengeance.

And I don't mean to meditate in private; I think my son benefits from being present while I am trying to be present, and meditate, but the silence of an empty room, the high wind of the eternal self when I take that familiar posture and just close my eyes...it is necessary.

I was trained to meditate by Tibetan Buddhists, a tradition I revere. In that meditation, one gazes softly ahead, in honor of the notion that we must remain and seek to remain awake, even while in deep contemplation of the self. I was never able to fully immerse in this practice, though I attempted it for about ten years. Then, one day, about ten years ago, I sat to meditate with my yoga teacher. He told me to close my eyes, and focus, one-pointed, at the space between my brows. A miracle occurred! I went so, so deeply within, that I never wanted to come out. It was a sensation I will never forget, and it is just about immediately accessible every time I sit and close my eyes. And yes, I do think I would label it as "bliss."

I had a revelation that first time I closed my eyes to meditate, as well. A voice sprang up inside me, gentle but loud and clear. It said: "God and the Soul are One." I could even see all the caps in that sentence, in my mind's eye. It repeated. And again. When I came out of the meditation, I leapt up and I said, "I've had a revelation!" My teacher asked what it was. "God and the Soul are One!" I shouted. He shouted it back. We shouted it together. We began dancing around the room, singing, a la James Brown: "God and the Soul are One...unnnh! Hit me!"

So my experience of "God" or of "Soul" seems very direct to me. I wasn't asking for this information, though I'm sure I'd heard the concept before. Probably a million times. But on that day it came true for me, and has remained true for me ever since.

So when people tell me they are "bad" at meditation, I have to ask them what their techniques are, and if they've tried opening or closing their eyes.

My thoughts on how I was never fully alive until Bodhi was born parallel my experience with having an awakening on that day when I closed my eyes to meditate. My life was beautiful. I'd read poetry to hundreds of thousands of people. I'd traveled, been paid to travel abroad and recite my work, done just about every thing and tried just about every thing I ever wanted, loved and lost, lived in many different places, succeeded and failed in many endeavors. Even knew myself a little.

It was living with my eyes open.

Then, torn open and apart in every possible way on October 22, 2007, I closed my eyes, I went deep inside, and I saw that me, Elisabeth Anne, Liz, Lisa, Mrs. L, Miss B, Ms B, had finally, truly, become alive.