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/