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Meditation With Cats, Part 1
Summer, 2005
What is meditation? I have never understood it.
So I try to learn. I begin attending my friend Tara’s meditation group. Thursday mornings at 8:00. Now that I am no longer punching a time-clock at my old job, I have that hour free.
“Count to ten, ten times, counting on the exhale of your breath. That’s basically it.”
Tara is eleven years my senior, making her just 60 this year. She does not look 60, but then, I do not look 48 bordering 49.
“Okay. But I’m not comfortable at all.” I am sitting in a chair and feel as if my center body is collapsing in on itself. My belly feels huge, enormously rounded, though I am only a bit overweight. The excess pounds are unattractively allocated between thighs and abdomen, so that I look slender in certain clothes and awkwardly lumpy in others.
Tara examines my posture and says, “Just let your belly round out. You need to breathe into the belly. You’ll get used to it, it just feels weird in the beginning.”
I do not think I will ever get used to it, but I nod acceptance and gamely close my eyes. The other group member, a white-haired, vibrant woman named Betty, has been meditating for at least 20 years. She meditates silently on a “sound” given to her when she first learned TM, and looks perfectly comfortable in her chair. I watch her close her eyes, envious of her matter-of-fact readiness for a state of being I don’t really believe exists.
To be continued…
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This is a book review from my University of Metaphysical Sciences course, “The Unified Field,” written by Joseph S. Dillon:
“The Best Guide to Mediation (1998), by Victor N. Davich, introduces the reader to meditation in a very clear, straightforward way designed for the lay person. The author uses contemporary language and examples to describe the benefits of meditation and the steps to begin meditating now. This book is written in a how-to approach and covers a variety of mediation arts. Designed for the “I want it now” set, the book jumps right into getting people started and then takes its time to cover the finer points of meditation in more detail. The author provides many meditation exercises, a glossary, and resources in the last section of the book. This book provides an excellent foundation in meditation for those new to the practice.”
I will probably buy this book with a recently received Amazon gift card, since I have to use it on something. I consider myself a rank beginner in meditation arts so it should be useful.
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Meditation With Cats, Part 2
(Summer, 2005, cont’d.)
Tara settles on an ancient purple cotton zafu, her sturdy legs crossed, and looks as if she could levitate. I swallow down my discontent and try to just sit and not think.
This is much harder than you would imagine. Writing has always been my form of meditation, my sneaky channel into the hinterlands of the divine. I do not understand how to just BE, without words.
So as instructed, I count. Breathe in, breathe out, one. (I cannot help but notice that “one” is a word and requires rudimentary thought.) Breathe in, out. Two. In, out, three. All the way to ten. And then start over again. (“Can I use my fingers to keep track?” Tara laughs. “No. See how quick your mind is? It wants to find a shortcut…”)
Somehow I manage to count to ten, ten times, without opening my eyes, sneezing, or succumbing to the desperate urge to flee the room, escape the taint of burned sage and the self-satisfied aura of the successful meditators on either side of me. It has been the most tedious, uncomfortable fifteen minutes I have ever spent. Now I remember why I have always skittered around this process, but never made any real effort at “practice.” Meditation, schmeditation. Give me asleep or give me awake, but don’t ask me to go in between.
So, what is meditation?
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Thank you Catherine.
Walking and doing the counting of breath ( each step saying breathe in 2,3,4, breathe out,2,3,4 works for me) – but not sitting.
I sit in stillness often but not by trying. It seems to be a state that I am in and then it happens. Not controllable…
One teacher said listening meditation is still meditation.( maybe you can or your book comments on this)
I put a Steiner book (Steiner audio.com) on every morning as an audio book – not to think about but to have his vibrational words flowing . I start the day before light like this as a peaceful way of remembering that this is a “spiritual ” journey. That all of our bodies benefit by setting time aside. (he loves to repeat that we are physical, etheric, astral and ego or the “I”)…. so it helps me realize that being peaceful and breathing affects all the parts to align calmly as we traverse this material – physical world.
With Blossom’s message today, maybe more worlds will be “more” known sooner rather than later….
Steiner’s book – “How to know higher worlds and its Attainment” seems to be an ascension course as it helped me understand changes that happened to me by meditating as a practice . Does anyone else have experience with that book ? There are so many teachers with experience now teaching the stages so maybe the old ones are no longer used ?
just some comments as I enjoy what you share Catherine…
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Thanks for your ideas, Lori, and the Steiner suggestion. I’ll look him up. I listen to people just for the vibration, too, sometimes.
I’m on the fence about whether guided meditation (listening to a recording or live speaker) is “true meditation.” My Reiki teacher, Carolyn Paige, is also a certified hypnotherapist as well as clairvoyant and has many other abilities. She also has a master’s in metaphysics, something I’m working toward too.
I recall that she differentiated between hypnosis, meditation, and creative visualization / guided visualization or meditation. I’m not knowledgeable enough to explain how they differ, but I believe they do. Both from each other and within degrees of each one (deeper versus shallower). Different brain wave states, perhaps.
I think whatever we do for “quiet time” (and whatever we call it) is beneficial. I know breath awareness is paramount. Like you said, “it helps me realize that being peaceful and breathing affects all the parts to align calmly as we traverse this material-physical world.” Goodness knows, we need calmness!
There was a meditation group at the Unitarian Church half a mile from my house and I’ve yet to attend it; now of course it’s not happening. One of their methods was walking meditation. I’ve been so distracted by pain when walking (for years), I haven’t attempted it. But as the pain retreats, the possibility returns! I might even try it tomorrow.
Love & Light,
Catherine
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Meditation With Cats, Part 3
(Summer, 2005, cont’d.)
Several days later, I lie half-curled on my side atop my bed, waiting for my cat Ivan. After I have fed him and his brother Leo their evening food, Leo invariably lays on the floor in my office, his cat mind quieter than usual, not looking for trouble for these few minutes of peace. Ivan eventually follows me, as he always does, from room to room, furniture to furniture, a shadow of white as silent as any ghost, pink padded paws leaving no imprint on the carpeted floor.
So I wait, knowing he will jump up on the bed, find his way to my midsection, and settle his long tomcat body against my thighs, his front paws poised against the large round roll of my belly. And then he begins to knead. Always the same spot. The same loud purring. The same blissful expression on his faintly Siamese-shaped white face, whiskers akimbo with delight, yellow eyes slitted.
Tonight, I suddenly think: that is where I am supposed to breathe. These years that he has kneaded me there, somehow, he is telling me to breathe. Breathe here, breathe to the gentle piston of my paws, breathe to the rhythm of my purring, which is no rhythm at all, but a continuous rich burr of sound, sawing in and out on a pattern I cannot discern but which never fails to bring instant peace somewhere shy and hidden in my body.
I listen to his purr, and release my breath into his kneading. It is time to trim his claws. I smile and close my eyes, and breathe in and out, and for a second or two, do not think at all.
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I walk back into my office to discover Ivan sitting contentedly on my new half-moon zafu. On his brisket, in the crouched-lion-guard pose so famous on the Sphinx, he fits exactly on the burgundy-colored cushion, his white fur brilliant against the darker cloth. After I laugh, I get my camera, take half a dozen pictures. Leo sits in the shadowy closet doorway a few feet from Ivan, waiting to be fed. This, even though his food sits uncovered on the table—his feeding station, as he well knows. He wants Ivan’s special kidney-support kibbles, not his own, boring Wellness Light.
After Ivan vacates my meditation cushion, I sit cross-legged with my ever-present discomfort, trying to not-think, alternating between keeping my eyes open and occasionally letting them drop shut. In the morning the sun hits the carpeted office floor, and Ivan, ensnared by the heat and the light, follows its track. Now he sits in the narrow bar of light and watches his sibling with a faintly superior eye as Leo climbs on the desk chair, digs industriously under the towel seat-cover, leaps over to the white wicker chair, paces in a circle, sits, and finally looks expectantly at me as if I should reward this acrobatic show.
I have stopped worrying that I am anthropomorphizing my cats, and am content to catalog their differences as I would twin children.
They should be exactly alike. They are identical littermates, or as I usually think of them, brothers. Stark, unrelieved white, with delicate pink ears, noses, and paws, they sport the short dense fur typical of the un-pedigreed animals who wind up in shelters around the country. They are about the same size and weight, or were until Ivan lost so much weight several months back. Though the vet keeps telling me Ivan is dying, he shows no signs of doing so, and he is, after all, barely five years old. Leo and Ivan were born just about the time my father died, five years ago this summer, the summer of 2000, that millennial year—the last full year before the world changed with 9/11 and all of us, whither we will or no, changed too.
Leo finally settles on the white wicker chair and closes his eyes, paws grouped four in front of him, his flank and ribcage swelling gently upward with each breath. I give up the struggle to sit and “be,” and quit trying for today—another defeat, but somehow I am not depressed. Arising, I spontaneously stretch upward, fingers spread toward the sky, smiling at Ivan asleep in the tiny slot of sun. I stroke Leo’s feet as I walk by, then pause, awaiting his greeting. He squints and sniffs my fingers, touches his nose to the right forefinger, snuffles his breath out, and subsides once again. Meditation with cats is over for today.
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Meditation With Cats, Part 4
(Summer, 2005, cont’d.)
I am always afraid to write. I do not know enough yet to be afraid to meditate.
Candle flames in front of the mirror over my oak desk. I suddenly want candles all over the place, lit candles with flames to dance in the breeze. I want scents and incense, and bookshelves filled with the right books, and things to be gone that are not right.
Without particularly looking for it or even remembering that I had it, I found my small Buddha statue, a souvenir of one of my parents’ sojourns overseas; a beautifully carved teak sculpture, its warm dark gold-brown wood emanates a peaceful glow. And here, an antique carved wooden box inlaid with oxidized bronze that my mom has had forever, discovered on a scavenger hunt through the downstairs linen cupboard.
The CD player emits low harmonies from the corner. I have played Celtic meditation music and the cheesy-named “Spa Sounds” CD, so far. I will expand the repertoire.
The trappings are set. Today for some reason I also need the triple-flamed candle to burn in front of me, though I only watch it for a few seconds before closing my eyes.
I am too full from breakfast. My belly hurts. It always hurts when I try to sit like this. Even today, sitting on my knees with the zafu between my legs, supporting my pelvis and sit-bones, I feel full and filled with fog.
I sit, count, breathe. I do not breathe right, still. I know this, and know how to breathe right—I think—but I do not do it. Saturday at the stress-reduction retreat at Tara’s, I knew. But I was also lying on the floor and it was much easier then.
Today I am not thinking of Ivan dying. It is hard to remember how ill he is, as he runs up the stairs and fights with brother Leo. The huge expanse of shaved fur, from his chest to his groin, has begun to grow back. The earlier shaved spot on his neck is nearly undetectable. But still in his eyes I see the drawing down of life, as I have seen it always in him, even as the four-month-old kitten who first crept out of the carrier-cage and onto the bedroom carpet, sniffing, shaking, but pulled by a curious nose to see his new home, Leo right next to him, always at his side.
I breathe jerkily, shallowly, and try not to judge the jerkiness, the shallowness. Shallow breath, shallow soul, I think. And try not to think. I count. One to ten, ten times over. I think I miscounted on three or four, but I cheat and continue instead of starting over.
On the second round of ten/ten I spontaneously open my eyes somewhere on the third set, so happy at the beautiful music my eyes cannot stay shut. Guitar, a dance, gentle, slow, but rhythmic. I look to see what the cats are doing. They are still peacefully in the dormer window seat, side by side, but now Leo is smoothing the fur of Ivan’s cheek with his tongue, slowly, with the music, slowly stroking with the grain of the whiskers, the pink tongue flashing shyly against the thick white fur. His eyes are closed, and his rhythm changes to accommodate Ivan’s turning head, stroking now against the neck, getting the shorter once-shaved fur area, and traveling up to the ear.
Cats, I have read, cannot clean their own ears very well; it is one thing they must rely on from their fellow cats, siblings or adopted den/pride mates.
The guitar music continues to accompany, and Leo moves exactly as if to the tune, a dance of lions, of cheetahs, of the grand striped tigers of India. Mesmerizing, ancient, immensely dignified and yet prosaic and ordinary, the daily grooming of feline to feline.
Soon Ivan begins grooming Leo, so the two heads simultaneously move in syncopated rhythm, stroke-stroke, lick-lick. Leo’s ears get cleaned, his neck groomed, his cheek stroked with rough-wet tongue. Leo’s whiskers are stubs. I have seen Ivan chew them off, and Leo, blissful, allowing this. I do not know why.
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Catherine… are you able to remove my comments that interrupt the flow as I was unaware of the journey you are taking us on ?
Thank you and I’m sorry I did not realize.
Lori-
Hi Lori, heck no I don’t want to remove your comments! This is a community forum and I never intended to just create a single uninterrupted piece. That’s why I’ve numbered the story in parts so if people want to read consecutively, they can. I anticipated and hoped that others would join the discussion, which is whatever you want to say about meditation.
This is a place for discourse, not a canvas to showcase my writing. I apologize if anybody got that impression.
You and your comments are extremely valuable. I’m so grateful for everybody who’s participating, I’m hoping more will join in.
Love,
:c
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Meditation With Cats, Part 5
(Summer, 2005, cont’d.)
A kind of hatred and dread, carefully covered up, sits in the bottom of my solar plexus whenever I go to sit meditation. Everything should be light, free, lovely. The spiritual bliss touted by Those Who Know. All I think is, more torture. More minutes of not doing it right, of failing, of being wrong.
Restless, I open one eye, see Leo stalking carefully around the three-wicked lighted candle I have set before my zafu. His nose quivers, short whiskers trembling slightly, and his light jade eyes never leave the frightening object that smells of danger and the strange flowery scent.
I continue to watch him, and pretend I am breathing and meditating. I want this to be over.
Also, I don’t know where Ivan is.
Since I first brought these two creatures home to share my abode, I have never been able to be at rest or even simply be in the house without knowing where they are. An atavistic fear of losing them, though they shy away from the outdoors like the Wicked Witch from water. “You must promise to keep them indoors,” the shelter adoption coordinator had said. “All-white cats with pink skin are very susceptible to skin cancer.”
“Okay,” I responded, though at first it seems overly protective. My previous cats have always been dual dwellers of the inner and outer space.
In the last four-plus years I have become so accustomed to their continuous presence, it feels like someone else’s house if they are not both here. So I need to find Ivan before I can meditate (wonderful excuse, I think).
I check under my bed, which Leo favors, but which Ivan rarely needs as a shelter. Then all the corners of my bedroom, then on top of and in between the clutter in my walk-in closet.
I look in the birdhouse top part of their kitty condo, and atop the white bookcase in their feeding closet, inside the wicker double-decker cat holder, on the floor in all the corners, under the old TV cabinet that now serves as wireless router and cable modem storage. I move to the guest bedroom and check all over the top of the bed—as if he could be there and I not see him—under the bed, on hands and knees, looking on top of and between the neatly-arranged flat plastic storage boxes.
There is nowhere for him to hide up here. Where could he be?
After another round upstairs, checking the same places like a recently diagnosed patient holding the X-rays upside down and hoping they tell a different story, I finally go downstairs.
“Is Ivan down here?” I ask my mother.
“What? No, I don’t think so, honey, he must be upstairs.”
“Well he’s not.”
It is absurd to think he’d be gone. I check the family room. Is he on top of the built-in bookcase over the TV, the one I long to rip out by its crooked, amateurly affixed nails? He has hidden in plain sight there before, a white cat with pink nose tucked into paws blending seamlessly into the white bookshelf and wall, only noticeable when he opens his eyes and stares down at me.
No, not there. Nor is he anywhere else.
I return upstairs and make the same rounds. I know he must be here, but am completely at a loss as to how I could not see him.
The phone rings. It is a wrong number.
I return to search the guest bedroom and immediately spot Ivan’s white rump and part of his tail peeking from beneath the bedspread at the foot of the bed.
“Found him,” I call down to my mother.
And I return to my office, wondering how this morning’s distraction would play into my attempt at meditation. I am aware that the phone would have disturbed me if I had in fact been meditating when it rang, and can’t lose the nagging feeling that Ivan was hidden from me—by whatever means—until after the disturbing call for that very reason.
Ridiculous, I think, settling on my zafu again. Not logical, not likely.
I can’t mediate. I just can’t.
Leo sits behind me, finally quiescent, curled happily into the upholstered swivel desk chair I am going to sell. Before, when I was seeking Ivan, and trying to meditate, Leo scrambled into the towel covering the chair, pulling it down from the back, creating a nest of bunched towel that he kneaded cheerily before pummeling into the proper position for head-resting.
Now his head is up but he sits curled half-sideways, half on his brisket, eyes narrowed but not sleepy. He looks mellower than usual. I stroke him and wonder how he embodies my monkey-mind, or if that is yet another affectation of my lurching journey on this knowledge-path.
I stroke him, finally abandoning my meditation quest. Screw it, I think, and sigh as I feel the thick fur under my palm, and hear him purr.
The cats meditate far better than I do. The cats are living meditation. If meditating is “simply” being in the now, then beings unimpeded by a mind full of thoughts are evolved as far beyond us as the stars from the Earth.
No wonder the dolphins always smile.
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Meditation With Cats, Part 6
7/28/05
“Music for Meditation.” Another new CD.
Leo sits in the top tier of the wicker cat-basket, leaning the side of his face against the rim. He looks uncomfortable, but not being a cat, I really can’t judge.
I just read another snippet from one of my growing collection of “growth books” (what else to call this collection of Learning to Be Me?)—Life Colors by Pamala Oslie. I also left her another phone message to see if I can get a reading with her.
Leo moves his head enough to watch where Ivan goes. As long as these two have been in my life, it’s astonished me that one always knows where the other is. If I could ask, I’m sure they would say, oh, he’s under your chaise. Or, he’s on the blanket on top of the trunk in the guest bedroom.
He looks with a combination of longing and uncertainty to where Ivan has climbed atop the cat tree. If I could see Ivan’s aura, I am sure he would be one of the animals who thinks he’s human, and Leo, well Leo is definitely one who thinks he’s an animal. Whether it would be confirmed by Pamala Oslie or not, I choose to believe it.
It seems like there is nothing to be written about meditation. In that way it is exactly like writing. You do not learn how to write by hearing about it, reading about it, talking about it. You learn to write by writing.
Granted, there are necessary tools. Tools for writing: speech, language, alphabet or visible symbols, hieroglyphs, wax tablets and bone styli, Gutenberg’s press, the sleek laptop keyboard beneath my fingers. What then are meditation’s tools?
Silence. I think, first, it is silence.
But there isn’t any silence. Except perhaps in a sensory deprivation tank. Submerged, maybe that is silent. I think of the times I have swum, the pressure beneath the water, how that is a kind of vast muffling, an absence of types of sounds, but not the absence of Sound.
Absent-mindedness is a type of silence. Becoming so engrossed in a thought, or in observing something, to the exclusion of all else, creates a mental silence—an absence of Other while absorbed in a One.
Is there silence in the cats’ brains? Is there absence of thought that is more silent than the deaf, emptier than the hollow of airlessness in deep and ever-reaching space?
I know they hear. They hear everything, even the scrape of a spider’s eight feet across the carpet. But isn’t it silent in their minds?
Maybe it is peace I am thinking of, more than silence.
And maybe they are the same.
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Meditation With Cats, Part 7
8/2/05
It seems that, after all, simpler really is best.
Yesterday I lit three candles and tried to stare. It was interesting and entertaining in a way, but it did not “feel” like meditation.
How can I know what something does not feel like, if I do not know what it does feel like?
I stopped playing music, too. I have the CDs on now, random, wonderful Celtic non-rhythmic ballads, drifting and haunting, notes blown on flutes of God, calling from another place.
But not while I was quiet, simply kneeling with the zafu between my thighs, breathing—too shallowly—but breathing still, listening to the birds outside, the stirrings of the cats, Leo licking himself somewhere with slow, loving strokes. Ivan is silent behind me; I cannot hear him breathe but am aware of him as a live entity, somehow, despite the silence.
About a minute after I finish, the phone rings. It is Marci. Had I heard the news? Ah, yes, news from our mutual former place of work…
And I wonder, how it is that she called then, and not two minutes or fifteen minutes earlier, when I was patiently sitting, not “meditating” as I think of it, but still engaged in something meditative and calm and right somehow. From a place of knowing, inchoate as black ink against the night sky, I knew it was what mediation is supposed to be. For me. For this time. For this day, this hour, this minute.
Maybe mediation is so simple and indescribable it is impossible to think about or define. You can describe what it looks like from the outside—a person sitting with eyes closed, still, breathing deeply (or not so deeply), their face showing boredom or impatience—or nothing. It looks so completely ordinary, and so useless.
I suppose that is one of the hardest aspects. The seeming uselessness.
I need to be doing, almost constantly. A lot of passive doing: doing with my mind if I am not actually moving my body. I think incessantly. How should I arrange my room? Should I move that bookcase?…
To sit in my office, and not even stare at the wall and ruminate upon what furniture to fill it with, but simply to sit, and let my nostrils be filled with the lovely elusive scent of incense, and my hearing by the fretful rapping from construction across the street and the jets at the airport and the birds and the wind in the birch trees, and not think particularly about any of it, but just sit there and BE: That is very radical for me.
And until just this moment, I had no idea that it was radical, that such a passive, non-action activity could be in the same sentence with “radical.”
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Meditation With Cats, Part 8
Thurs. 8/4/05
Feel wild, absolutely unable and unwilling to just sit. Crazy full moon energy, though it’s not a full moon. The soothing Celtic music seems a mockery—much more apropos is the roar of the Porsche across the street. Impatient, tiger-throat roar.
The cats were wild this morning, too. Don’t know why unless it was the feathers. In my sudden compulsion to organize yesterday, I came across the feather Mardi Gras mask, the one I wore on the Murder Mystery cruise with Jim for the captain’s masked-ball dinner. I have a picture of me, a sardonic closed-lipped smile making me look like I was anything but enjoying myself. Was I? Did I? I thought so at the time.
When I got back from errands this morning, the cats had unerringly discovered the one interesting new decoration: my feather Mardi Gras mask. They managed to pull it off the wall from a nail about four feet higher than the table below, a distance I foolishly thought was safe.
I should have known that anything with feathers would prove irresistible to Ivan. When I open the cupboard containing the ostrich feather duster, he wakes up if sleeping, or raises his head if ruminating in that way cats have that can last for hours. Looks up, ears forward, eyes bright yellow-and-black. And he follows me from table to table, following his love, following the feathers of a bird long dead.
I still have a hard time sitting during meditation. I still think and think and only occasionally feel a brief cessation of the burden of my self. Brief, and unremarkable, until it is gone—the awareness that is really knowing Nothing, the feeling that isn’t, the thought that doesn’t quite form.
How are we, we ordinary busy humans with lives and families and jobs, ever supposed to get it? How can we learn something that cannot be taught, that must be intuited or absorbed or gifted to us from an unknown source? Perhaps that source is the true Fountain of Youth, because in it the waters are ageless, because there is no time; and the soul, which after all must exist outside the sack of fluid that is the brain, the soul is already there.
So maybe the fountain is simply becoming aware that the waters of youth already ebb within us, filling at times, draining away at times, the knowledge obvious before it is again obscured.
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Meditation With Cats, Part 9
Sat. 8/6/05
Writing about meditation is like trying to write a rainbow—the instant you describe the exact colors, they shift, and then, even as you watch, fade and vanish until they are only a memory on the retina of the sky. Impossible to describe, impossible to teach, but, I persist in believing, possible to learn.
Today I sit cross-legged, trying the position that has been so uncomfortable I haven’t attempted it since the first few days. It is still uncomfortable, but today I just sit, and feel uncomfortable.
I have been using two suggestions from When Things Fall Apart: one is that thinking may be acknowledged with the word itself, Thinking, thereby removing oneself by one layer from identifying as the Thinker, from BEING the Thinker; and using minute physical adjustments when shifting around on the zafu, instead of yanking upright or jerking my hands along my thighs, seeking that elusive, comfortable, upright but relaxed posture that I so envy, and cannot seem to duplicate to save my life.
Today, I practice the small movements, to attempt to find an acceptable level of discomfort so I am not completely focused on the pain of my back, or the tingling in my sit-bone area as I settle onto the zafu. I sit up slightly straighter in minute increments, and between admonitions of “thinking”—trying also not to judge, but simply acknowledge—and the small shifting movements, I have what must be a few seconds of awareness.
Breathe in, breathe out, shallowly still, improperly still. Every time I try to breathe deeply as I know I am supposed to, as I have been taught, as every yogi or guru or wise woman will tell you, every time I try to breathe into the space of my gut, it hurts, and the gut pushes back, and says There is no room here. You cannot breathe, here.
So I breathe as much as I can, and I count, and when I get to three on the second round of ten of 10, I stop, because I am done.
The two cats still lie in the sun in front of me. Leo is stretched in a large crescent, head in the bar of sun, remainder in shadow. Ivan lies curled loosely in a ball, most of him in the sun, his fragile ribs rising skyward with his breath. His whiskers catch the sunlight and glow. Leo raises his head, looks at me, puts his head back down. Ivan does not move.
I don’t know why my stomach hurts. I don’t care. I want it to stop, but don’t think I can make it. I may never breathe right. I don’t care much about that, either. I just must do it, regardless of whether it is right, or proper, or gets better, or if I learn. I just do it.
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Reading this last today … How funny the similarity between
Writing about meditation is like trying to write a rainbow—the instant you describe the exact colors, they shift, and then, even as you watch, fade and vanish until they are only a memory on the retina of the sky. Impossible to describe, impossible to teach, but, I persist in believing, possible to learn.
and “outrunning your shadow”, beating your chess opponent. Guess the TRUE answer is AIM Becoming the rainbow. It’s your reflection within another BEING Awareness.
Thank you so much Catherine… and how blessed you must be with your name CATherine hahahahaha 😂
Ralph Ra~Luv
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Meditation With Cats, Part 10
Tues. 8/9/05
Discipline is such an ugly word.
Didn’t, didn’t, didn’t want to sit this morning. Meditation, schmeditation.
So I didn’t, really. I set my zafu just outside the block of sun beginning to filter in through the fog, facing the eastern window where the tree was cut down the day I started meditating in this room. The day the tree was cut down, there was so much light in this room it lit the dark hallway beyond the door, and, looking up the steps toward the hallway, made you think there was a sun bursting from the room itself.
Now there is no filter for the light that streams in, so I sit nearly in the closet to keep my face from its brightness. But I feel it on my hands.
There is nothing but distraction. There is nothing of “meditation” in the way I slump into myself. I feel like a parody, a very bad imitation of a fifth-rate yogi. Not even sitting cross-legged, but on my heels with the comfort of the zafu beneath me. Like we used to sit in Karate, between exercises, and at the beginning and end of class, before sparring sometimes.
I would often see upper Belts simply sitting on their heels, palms relaxed atop their steel-muscled thighs, gazing vacantly into their own eyes in the mirror wall we practiced before. Their gis would be stained with sweat if they had been working out, or pristine-looking except for the smudges on their colored belts. I had already washed my White belt before someone told me belts were never washed. But my orange and purple are not very dirty; I was always clean, even in that sweaty, grimy environment. That sacred space.
My mind will neither go away nor stay and be useful. A few times I remember the mantra “thinking, thinking” to remind myself—my Self, that person who is more energy-entity than human being—that the thinking is a distraction, to acknowledge it without judgment and not try to chase it away. But I still wish it would go away.
When I feel pain it does no good to say “thinking.” It isn’t thinking. It’s feeling, and it hurts, and I cannot focus beyond or around it. I can’t imagine how someone really suffering, who is in truly dreadful, unremitting pain, could possibly ignore it or move beyond it using meditation. Yet I know that is one of the purposes of this practice, to just “be with” the pain, acknowledge it, and Just Do It anyway.
Why do I keep trying to meditate? I so want to give up. What is the point? I am thinking about this busy day ahead of me, the errands, delivering avocados to my former boss, the four business emails to answer and though I don’t want to think about it, money is running out and perhaps I’d better look for some more work.
Why should I try to sit here and not-think when I am thinking anyway, and a bloody lot of good it’s doing to waste this time?
I settle on the zafu once more, again on my heels, hands loose atop my thighs. Without thinking I lean suddenly down over my legs, relaxing my forehead on the carpet. The first big, natural breath of several moments fills my body. I am so relieved to feel relatively comfortable I stay put, breathing in, breathing out, counting, counting. After a few minutes I come up again, without thinking about it first, just come up into the same slightly off-center, slumped posture I had had earlier.
But it does not feel quite so impossible now. I am counting the eighth set of ten. Just counting, counting. Feeling stupid about it, and a failure, and wondering why I keep trying.
Last set. Ten of ten. No doubt from the anticipated relief of being done with this farce, I begin to feel calmer. A tiny, nearly unnoticeable trickle of serenity seeps into me, somewhere through the cracks in the shell of pain, of feeling-stupid, of worry, of uselessness, of thinking-ahead-thinking-behind in which I perpetually stew, day after day, all my waking moments.
Most of the time it’s not unpleasant, that stewing. I often think good thoughts, anticipating pleasant events, happy that my family is healthy, things are going mostly okay.
But still. It is always thinking, thinking. And meditation is surely not about thinking. Mindfulness, yes. Thinking, no.
So the few moments of calm seem to act like a tonic on the perpetual stew, like squeezing a drop of lemon juice into a bowl of oil. The drop spreads and chases away the oil, making a much larger clear space than you would imagine just a drop or two of acid would do.
The lemon-juice clarity pushes the oily thoughts away. They are still there, but the small space of clarity is enough.
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Meditation With Cats, Part 11
Wed. 8/10/05
Not so fidgety this morning. Not so impatient, so “Must Do It Right and Right Now” feeling. Instead I play for a while. I settle on the zafu, on my heels, hands on thighs. Just feel what that is like for a bit. Look around the room, admire the sun, and watch the cats discover the sun and begin to settle down.
Ivan first. Leo, Mr. Curiosity, has to shift, move a bit, check out several options before stretching out next to his brother. And still he doesn’t put his head down right away. (Am I sensing a kindred spirit?) I watch them, stroke Leo’s gleaming white fur, murmur the refrain of “Hi, Leo,” croon endearments, and scratch behind his ears and under his chin. He purrs quietly, not the freight-train rumble of Ivan in full spate.
Eventually I sit back again and contemplate how I am sitting. Okay I guess. Not comfortable, but then when am I ever?
I notice how I feel. The physical minutia. The usual achy-painy feelings. The way my back starts to thrum, in the left shoulder/scapula area, the uncomfortable nerve feeling. I try not to shuffle too much, but move in those small increments suggested in that book. A tiny shift here, a nudge there.
When I allow myself to stop chasing my thoughts around, I am aware, on almost a cellular level, of what it feels like to be in me. It occurs to me that we have bodies because it is the biggest, most obvious metaphor the Universe can give us, the closest to us, the most expeditious way possible to help us Get It.
Whatever It is.
I get how one tiny shift in one minute part of me affects my whole body. How, if I straighten up a quarter of an inch, I feel it in my lower and upper back, spine, shoulders, neck, head. How if I pull both palms inward along my thighs, half an inch closer to my torso, I feel it in palms, wrists, forearms, upper arms, shoulders, neck, head, back, buttocks…everywhere. Even my feet. The tiniest movement in the tiniest spot, when I am just sitting and aware like that, is magnified, not unpleasantly, but remarkably, in a way I couldn’t imagine were I not experiencing it directly.
I think of dancing and karate, of running, of pushing myself to run up hills, and the wild freedom of running down hills, how incredible it is to be light and fit and have my lungs expanding with great gulps of air. And how different this is, how unlike that expansive movement, that big-paint-strokes-on-an-acre-of-canvas feeling.
This is tiny pointillism on the head of a pin. Absolutely undetectable without the magnification of the meditation. Even my “fake” meditation, my extremely imperfect, untaught, rebellious “I’ll figure it out myself thank you” meditation.
I cannot deny the instinct that pushes me thus to Just Meditate, without a teacher, guru, Zen master, TM training, or reading books till my eyes fail. I am reading enough, measured sips from the wisdom that I sense emanating from certain pages of certain books, and listening to a careful selection of words from friends and unwitting masters I come across.
The selectivity is beyond me but is also the most intelligent Me—all those words and descriptions, you know what they are, Higher Self, Future Self, the wise woman, the One Who Knows…the one who defies classification, but whom we recognize immediately, on that cellular level, without words, labels, or particular fanfare.
She, he, or it is an unfailing guide simply because there is no motivation, nothing for she/he/it to gain, other than to help me remember what I already know, to help me push out of this casing of garbled intellect and thinking-mind in which I have become entangled over my 48 years.
I am visualizing Frodo in the movie “The Return of The King” when he has been efficiently mummified in the monster spider Shelob’s sticky, suffocating web. And being able to slice through that encasement with my bare hand, being Frodo emerging from the vile cocoon, without Sam’s help, without Sting to cut me free.
Being Frodo, and Sam, and Sting. Perhaps that is my higher self of the moment. The higher self that changes constantly, or rather, my perception of it changes constantly. I am fairly sure that It, Itself, does not change at all.
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