On grounding (when groundless)

reflections on the bardos, the inner critic and letting go

I’ve tried writing a few times in the last month or so, and then gone ahead and deleted everything. I wasn’t sure about my voice, who I was speaking to, or why I was saying anything at all. Was it to update an audience, was it for me, was it to explore a thought?

It couldn’t have been ‘for me’ because I kept thinking of the receiver of this piece of writing, whoever they may be.

It wasn’t to explore a thought, because I found myself writing thoughts I’ve already had, ephemeral feelings I’ve already felt that were beginning to sound regurgitated, like I was trying to be something, emulate some idea of how I’m supposed to sound, and finding none of it ringing true.

Lately I’ve found myself deep - or not so deep - into one of my creative practices, and noticing myself getting angry, and then angrier, and then just full on agitated. I’m wondering why this is and I have two theories at the moment. One is that the meditativeness of any creative hands-on practice implies a sitting with thoughts, and it’s possible my thoughts haven’t been the most pleasant in recent weeks. The other is that I’m so focused on making the thing right, whatever it is, for it to be good and presentable and skillfully executed, that I’m just in it for the outcome, and that’s no fun at all.

Whichever it is, there is agitation, both when it doesn’t turn out ‘right’, but surprisingly most often when it does turn out predictably ‘right’.

I’m not always engaging in the creative process though, and I’m aware that my desire to do so operates in cycles. I have noticed that when I do allow myself the freedom to work and create, though, that I feel on some level connected, centered, grounded. When I’m not, I don’t feel that way, and the more that I don’t feel that way, the more I avoid the practice. Perhaps to avoid the agitation, the anger, the thoughts.

The problem is that the thoughts are there anyway.

On the last day of the year, I spent the afternoon with one of my oldest and dearest friends who lives far away and was visiting after a small lifetime. Much to my surprise, I started to talk about ‘how I’ve been’ and I had a full on sob sesh that she unfortunately was forced to witness. She reinforced what I was already on some level aware of: that I was giving myself a heck of a hard time for no good reason. That it was almost like I felt I needed to do that in order to change, or be better, or move ‘forward’. Essentially, shaming myself all the time, everyday, except in moments where I wasn’t letting my mean inner voice dictate all.

And of course there are moments like that, there are gaps in that meanness. I started reading a book about the bardos, that can be described in Tibetan Buddhism as gaps, transitions or liminal spaces between death and rebirth. According to the book, called ‘How we live is how we die’ by Pema Chödrön, which frequently references The Tibetan Book of the Dead, there are a number of bardos, namely six: the bardo of this life, of dreaming, of meditation, of dying, of dharmata, and of becoming. I won’t get into these, because I’m concerned right now only with the idea of the ‘gap’.

That gap, or transition, is what I understand to be the space between an ending and a beginning, and this idea of being in transition all the time, because something is always beginning as a result of something else ending. There is a gap between my waking and my rising, between my coffee-making and my yoga-doing, between lunch with a friend and the time I am home. There’s also this idea I got that no one experience will ever happen again; even if I do one particular thing every single day, it will never be the same as before.

Last week I went over to a friend’s to help her rearrange her space. She is a relatively new friend, and has only recently moved to Karachi. Whether in light of my recent reading, or as a byproduct of my tendency to float out of my body sometimes, as I spoke to her and helped her move her furniture around her apartment, I became aware of the transitional nature of our interaction, this sense that she has not always been here and neither will she likely be and neither likely will I, and here we are. I observed her as she spoke and observed myself as I spoke, momentarily shedding that layer of self-consciousness that has historically dominated most of my social interactions. Normally, when I become aware of the impermanence of things, of people in my life especially, I feel quite sad. In that moment I was calm and forgiving and present.

“If you become more at ease with the transitory quality of life and the inevitability of death, that ease will be transmitted to others.”

One thing I’ve learned and continue to learn is that much of meditation, or a practice of meditation, has to do with accepting impermanence. I think that as theory this doesn’t hold as much weight as when we see it happening. To accept impermanence is to let go, and to let go can be both destabilizing and liberating. I learned this, probably not for the first time, last week.

I went to the beach with my friends and there was a particular adventure I wanted to go on nearby that I was trying to convince everyone to go do with me. It wasn’t everyone else that concerned me as much as the friend who was driving (the same one who saved me from the ocean) who normally spearheads our beach plans, who for some reason was presenting a great resistance to what I wanted to do. As I persisted, he resisted. We were laughing about it, but it was there, that resistance, this sense that I want this and it must happen or else I will have a bad time. Eventually, after swimming and grounding myself in the sand, I actively started to let go of my need to steer the plan in the direction I wanted it to go. I recognized that I was only causing my own suffering and would prolong any energy of tension that was already lingering. In that time my resistant friend went for a walk. I had settled into the current space, and I was happy to do so.

When he came back, all of a sudden, he was asking when I wanted to go to the other place, and asking what time it was and planning when we would pack up to head there. I was wide-eyed incredulous. I happily, even smugly, confronted him about his change in stance, and he told me that in the time I was busy letting go of control, he recognized his need to control too, and saw how it was ultimately just giving him a hard time. It felt like such a strange and beautiful and synchronous thing to happen and everything kind of just fell into place as it was meant to and we had the most pleasant rest-of-the-day. I’m sure that both of us went home that evening recognizing some great power in what had happened and in what we both learned.

So much is fleeting, you know. Especially feelings. I wonder how we would live in every moment if we stepped back and thought, this will never happen again, and this is all there is. Like this picture I took a few days ago of the most chance meeting of beings in a frame:

Anyway… when it comes to who or what I’m writing for, I can’t say I’m entirely sure. My most internally fulfilling writing has come from landing somewhere I didn’t plan to when I started out, and this speaks to that groundlessness that doesn’t just exist within a creative practice, but at all times. And maybe it’s just that very practice that creates that groundless gap in space and time in which I become conscious of that uncertainty. And sometimes it leads to anger, and agitation, and fear, and mean thoughts. Other times, when I’m more ‘grounded’, I can just let it be. And the funny thing that is dawning on me is that in order to be more grounded, letting it all be, letting myself be, is both step 1 and step 10. That’s the practice I guess, and on and on it goes. There is comfort in returning to what I have returned to so many times before.