Seek, Bhakti diary feb 7

I dreamt I heard whispering.  Close to my ear.  As though the whisperer wanted the words to wake me, but didn’t want anyone else to hear.  This happens to me.  If I remember, I write it down and call it poetry.  I pretend I ‘wrote it’ but really I only write it down.

Many things happen to me, odd little things.  Mostly, always, I ignored them.  Certainly never mentioned them.  But I am beginning to get more brave.

Strange, odd little things.  Such as, I didn’t have an orgasm until I was 26 years old.  Not terribly odd, actually, but not a thing I rush about telling people.  The odd thing is, sometimes I orgasm when I pray.  Or when I lay in Shavasana.  This is also not something I rush about telling people, but I think I maybe have to, now, to make my point.  My point is that something tremendous happens.  Something unutterable.  It’s born in yoga.  It’s born in body.  It’s more profound than religion, because it’s personal and gut real.  I mean mind and body and god get all mixed up, I can’t tell them apart, and I think this has implications for other people.

The whispering.  It said there is a difference between seeking and looking for answers.  I’m not looking for answers.  Looking, seeking, to appreciate and believe in my experience.

The whispering kept referring to a form of silence.

Most of us live in a kind of silence, all our lives.

The mind and the body are one, mind is body, body minds the mind. Science and doctors are proving this, mystics have written about it from the beginning.  But it remains a fact that most of us are detached from our body in ways both subtle and overt.  The way we eat.  The abuse we put it through.  Our little self-loathings.  Our focus instead on ‘rational’ things.  Body is an afterthought, at best.  An obsession, at worst.  There are extremes, of paralysis, or eating disorders, or addictions, or psychosomatic illness.  But the whole thing is arc, it touches all of us.  Most of us have numbed down our senses, disconnect emotions and thoughts from body, fail to see what and how the things all weave together. 

If asked, most of us are illiterate when it comes to ‘consciousness’, the aging process, the experience of trauma, our approaches to disability and rehabilitation, our productivity and relationship to environment. If asked, we don’t feel, we think.  Or we simply feel a kind of silence.

This same silence is like a gravity.  That heavy. That alchemical.  The natural law we live under.  We feel it in the space between our thoughts, in murky dream and sleep, we feel it between ourselves and others.  We feel the silence in daydreaming, or in seeing a gorgeous thing as sunrise or ocean or storm.  We feel it when we accomplish.  And when a love walks away for a final time. Inwardly, it may be a longing or an ache.  Or something felt as both empty and full.  It is a source, of loss, certainly, but also of love and compassion.

Seeking is not the same as looking for answers.  Ultimately, any answer offered about these things would be a lie.  Anything expressing the unsayable has to immediately be retracted or couched in paradox.  But seeking is possible.  Seeking is important. 

Seek and ye find, holy sweet.  I have found something, felt something, and it is good.  I have had to seek a subtler connection between mind and body.  It isn’t answer. It isn’t learning or books or proof – though those things do come after and make it richer, work as dog-earred pages of the thing itself.  Seeking doesn’t end the silence, but enters it.

At some point, I began to reach more profoundly into my own experience.  To seek intuitively into what often feels like darkness.

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