Freedom

I started practising intermittent meditation in my thirties. I'd bought a book by Shunryu Suzuki, a Japanese zen master... 

   


I expected something deep and philosophical, and I was quite disappointed: the book started with pages about how important it is to sit straight....


I am not sure why I carried on reading, but I came to appreciate a spirit quite different from anything I expected. It turned out to be deep  once I got used to it. I really liked the book and the author.


I started spending some time everyday sitting straight and focusing as much as I was able to focus, which was not much, on my breath, feeling that I was wasting my time being bored. I stopped, started again, forgot about it, came back to it...


It was actually once of the most precious thing I would offer to myself. One day, sitting doing nothing for nothing, I spontaneously smiled... . It was not a big feeling, there was not much intensity, there was just a smile.

My own hell has always been made of intense emotions and feelings; it didn't stop just because I had find a way to smile for a few seconds every morning. 

A smile for nothing  is freedom. 

The beginning. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The fish on the sink

Image
Dear unknown friend, Where were you? I was a little boy, maybe 8 years old. I had a great admiration for my uncle Raymond. He always arrived late for Sunday lunches when the family was gathering at my grandparents. Instead of wearing dull and stiff Sunday clothing, he turned up in sportswear, sweating and went for a shower. From the point of view of a little boy who would be sternly told off for being two minutes late this meant great freedom. Raymond was a fisherman. I was fascinated looking at the big fish he brought and left to die a slow and distressing death on the kitchen sink. They were barbels and so full of bones that my grandmother never prepared them. It takes hours for a fish to die. Paying close attention I could feel the exhaustion that squashed them and kept them quiet whilst the agony of being out of the water slowly built up enough strength for just another hopeless spasm… Flap! Flap flap! …. And they were quiet again, though I knew they weren’t dead and I somehow
Read more

In the psychiatric ward

Image
  When I was twenty-one, I found a job in a psychiatric hospital. I worked there for two years as an auxiliary nurse. Auxiliary was the lowest rank in the hierarchy. Lower than that you’re just ill! I am still thinking of the people I met there… Let me introduce them to you.    Mauricette was about thirty years old but she looked sixteen, the age she was trapped by schizophrenia. She wore that kind of dull clothing you wear when you’re an inmate in a psychiatric hospital, she wore socks but no shoes, she had shoulder length dark and untidy hair and she was perpetually possessed by acute anger. She spent her days walking to and fro in the doorways or turning round the tables- always anticlockwise. Her fists clenched, she was churning out an unceasing string of the angriest and crudest words… Her anger is my anger.   One day Mauricette stood in front of me in the middle of the path, hands joined over her head, on one leg as if practising a yoga stance called “the tree” Sh
Read more

Antivenom for the soul ()

Image
Dear  friend, Do you how antivenom is made? Venom is collected from snakes; horses are injected with it. The horses fight the venom. Then the human draw blood from the horses, the antivenom is in it. This is literally true, and this is also a metaphor. Dear friend, maybe you are a "horse" as well... It's our job to be poisoned and fight within our own souls. Whether we know it or not, we are useful. The suffering is more bearable when it makes sense though. We are making antivenom for ourselves and others... A famous verse of the Emerald Table goes like this: "That which is below is like that which is above & that which is above is like that which is below to do the miracles of one only thing" A way to understand what it means is to see anything that exists in the material world as a reflection of something that exists in the invisible planes, that is the psychological and spiritual planes... If some beings, in our case horses, do make antiveno
Read more