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/