Almost free

 A favorite form of meditation is to sit in silence and be mindful of the feelings and thought patterns that pop up. The notion is one of a train of thought that is about to leave the station, but we are mindful enough to jump off and return to that moment of inner silence, perhaps aided by a mantra that we repeat or a specific breathing technique that we practice.

 

There is nothing wrong with this particular method. In fact, I practice it too sometimes. Yet, you may have observed that it is unnatural at the same time. When a feeling or a thought pops up, it wants to be expressed. It arose for this very reason to have room to expand. It would be way more natural to let it run and jump off when we have looked through its false allure or feel the need to put something into action in response. In either way, we are truly done with this particular “thought-feeling-energy” and don’t feel the need to suppress it.

 

A strange transition took place in my experience of dreams over the last few years. These days I still dream but I observe the dreamworld. I still experience the happenings as occurring to “me”, but I see them as an observer without assigning many feelings of good and bad to them as I did in the past, such as experiencing a nightmare as opposed to a happy dream for example. Likewise, true spiritual progress is if it becomes easy for us in real life to just look through the illusionary nature of something that would have been associated with “good” or “bad” in the past. That’s when a “thought-feeling-energy” can easily exhaust itself in real life without requiring our personal identification.

 

Freedom is when all action is born out of silence, love, abundance, but we are almost free when we can awaken from duality as it enters our attention. It’s a phenomenon of insight, acceptance and simultaneous letting go.