Ground of Being

To be truly centered, living from the hara, dan tien, kath, requires first being grounded. Attempting to be centered, to live from our center rather than just from our mind and emotions without first being grounded essentially is asking ourself to surrender into an energetic stance that we’re not sure that we trust. When grounded, we trust where we are. Beyond being here now, we are being here and now while we trust. Trust is the body is the sense of being supported by the earth. Not just the sensations in our feet, our butt, but receiving the support that the earth gives us while lying, sitting, standing, moving.

Eastern practices assume one is grounded and treat the belly center as the foundation. Many Westerns have been meditating until their knees fall off and yet because the ground is not trusted, practice has no solid foundation. To sit with the lower body firm as a mountain, ground is a prerequisite. For years I struggled to live from my center and though I made slow progess, my electrified lack of ground made this work excruciating difficult.

Gravity is the force of attraction two bodies have on each other and the force of the attraction is proportional to the mass of each body. The earth is so incredibly much larger than you and me that it’s gravitational attraction to each of us keeps us from flying off into space as our home planet hurtles and spins on its journey. We have a much much smaller gravitational pull on the earth, but in fact with each step we take, the entire earth imperceptibly rises up to meet our foot.

Grounding also has emotional and spiritual components. Emotionally we can feel and accept that the earth cares about us. Spiritually, devotion to Divine Mother, to Mother Earth, directly perceiving the sacredness of all thought and form, trusting that reality is more than that which the senses and the rational mind can experience.

The journey to healing can only begin grounded here in this moment. How alive are you willing to be? Aliveness is our connection with the ground of being. Being ungrounded can result in anxiety or living in total devastation, depending on the level of separation from the Ground of Being. From numbness and denial to stark terror.

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It's possible I am pushing through solid rock
in flintlike layers, as the ore lies, alone.
I am such a long way in I see no way through,
and no space; everything is close to my face, and everything close to my face is stone.

I don't have much knowledge yet in grief--

so this massive darkness makes me small.

You be the master: make yourself fierce, break in:

then your great transforming will happen to me,

and my great grief cry will happen to you.

–Ranier Maria Rilke, translated by Robert Bly

http://www.livingdying.org/

2 Kabir Poems-versions by Robert Bly

Friend, hope for the Guest while you are alive.

Jump into experience while you are alive!

Know and feel while you are alive.

What you call “salvation” belongs to the time before death.

If you don’t break your ropes while you’re alive,

Do you think ghosts will do it after?

The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic

Just because the body is rotten –

That is all fantasy.

What is found now is found then.

If you find nothing now

You will simply end up with an empty apartment in the City of Death.

If you make love with the divine now, in the next life

You will have the face of satisfied desire.

So plunge into the truth, find out who the true teacher is,

Believe in the Great Sound!

Kabir says this: when the Guest is being searched for

It is the intensity of the longing that does all the work.

Look at me and you will see a slave of that intensity.

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Oh friend, I love you, think this over

Carefully! If you are in love,

Then why are you asleep?

If you have found him,

Give yourself to him, take him.

Why do you lose track of him again and again?

If you are about to fall into heavy sleep anyway,

Why waste time smoothing the bed

And arranging the pillows?

Kabir will tell you the truth: this is what love is like:

Suppose you had to cut off your head

And give it to someone else,

What difference would that make?

http://www.livingdying.org/

Do you trust being in a body on this earth?

Contemplative practices that come from the East assume that the practitioner is not neurotic and is firmly grounded on Mother Earth. The electrical shocks that I recounted in the previous post left me feeling extremely ungrounded. Twice while following my joy and my curiosity I almost got killed. These incidents happened before I had become a rational being. So even though intensive meditation practice brought me temporary relief from the uncomfortableness that I was experiencing being in my body, the sense of peace and well being was always short-lived. It felt to me like pouring nectar into a sieve.

I have now been meditating for more than 40 years. I have practiced vipassana, zen, Hindu, Christian, sufi, shamanic, chi gung, dzogchen, Tibetan Buddhist, and Taoist forms of of meditation and contemplative prayer with some of the greatest masters in the world. States of non-dual awareness, concentration and deep devotion came naturally to me. Yet until I recently discovered how crucial grounding and then being centered were as a foundation to the whole meditative process, the fruits of my practice were always frustratingly fleeting.

Meditation and contemplation fundamentally is the process of disidentifying from ego structure, from a solid sense of self. But if one does not have a solid sense of self to begin with, the process almost always becomes a mess. You have to become somebody before you become nobody. Eastern practices assume that you have a healthy and grounded personality as you undertake the search for freedom from suffering. His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama said that most surprised him about Americans is they don’t like themselves.

In my case the need to develop grounding and centering is probably more extreme than that of many others, but my experience as a meditation teacher is that almost all Westerns are limited in their ability to meditate by a deficit of these fundamental qualities. Being grounded is one of the first lessons that a baby needs to learn after being born. The Earth supports us. We can trust that we are supported. There is even an emotional component to this sense of grounding. The Earth wants us to be happy, to trust our sense of physical support. Modern birthing practices, especially those that were used when baby boomers were born, did not encourage a sense of being grounded to say the least. We live in a society that is profoundly uncentered and ungrounded.

http://www.livingdying.org/

What drove me to meditaion

Let me say a little about my early childhood. Not that it was that unusual, but a pattern was created that drove me to intensive meditation practice for many years and that also limited my ability to harvest the sweet fruits of this practice until finally I was able to touch directly this underlying pattern.

As a small child I twice received severe electrical shocks, once while a toddler putting a hairpin into an electrical outlet (my earliest memory in life) and then a few years later I put a fork in the toaster trying to extract my toast. Both times I remember feeling happy and curious.

"Wow, this two-pronged thing I just found on the floor fits perfectly into these two holes in the wall. Neat, I'm going to crawl over and put it in."

"Cool, finally old enough to make my own toast. All the butter and jam I want. The toast is stuck but I can get it out."

Only to learn that the world was not as safe as I had assumed.

My nervous system got fried especially during my toaster encounter. I couldn't let go of the fork and my mom was in the basement doing the laundry, so it took her what seemed like forever to get to the kitchen and unplug the toaster. Right after this I started to stutter. For 25 years I felt like God had put me on the wrong planet. Finally in my late 20's I discovered meditation. My first teacher was Shunryu Suzuki Roshi at San Francisco Zen Center. Occasional tastes of peace were all that I needed to plunge into meditation and devotional practices with the one-pointed passion that a drowning man has for an almost-in-reach life preserver.

http://www.livingdying.org/

This blog, part of the Living/Dying Project website, will have two main content streams.

First, musings on my life–stuff that I find fascinating, fun, provocative, inspiring. Second, I am facilitating four ongoing small groups(http://www.livingdying.org/pages/events.html) called Healing at the Edge as part of the Project. These groups are exploring deep healing/spiritual awakening. My experience as a meditator, a meditation teacher, and a guide for the dying has been that almost all Westerners have psychological patterns, patterns that determine how energy moves through our body, patterns that eventually deeply limit our progress on the path of awakening. Yet Eastern contemplative practices assume that the practitioner is grounded and not neurotic; they do not directly uncover and heal these long-held patterns. There are a lot of ungrounded, uncentered, neurotic meditators. In these groups and in this blog we will create a solid foundation from which to heal. True healing arises from contact with the Sacred, with the Wisdom Mind. Without a grounded and centered foundation, the heart of compassion will continue to open and close as it feels safe or unsafe. And without the selfless purity of compassion, contact with the Sacred, wholeness, will remain no more than a nice idea.