Welcome to meditation.
This is a meditation that is for moments when your life is on fire.
This is a meditation for moments when you're in a dark night of the soul,
When you're in a lot of pain.
And it can be done if you're in a lot of physical pain or medical pain.
But it's really designed for moments when you are in a state of anguish.
We all have these moments.
When they're happening,
There aren't so many tools that help us.
We may want to escape.
We may want to numb the pain in some way or avoid the pain in some way.
We may just want to die to escape one more moment of the anguish.
Maybe we can't sleep.
Maybe we can't eat.
This practice is a variation of a traditional practice that comes from the Tibetans,
Where the tantric Tibetans would practice in what are called charnel grounds.
The charnel grounds are where in the upper Himalaya mountains,
They dispose of the dead,
Not through burial because they can't really dig into that ground,
And not through fire because the wood is very sparse.
But by dismembering the bodies and offering them to the animals that are scavengers,
The vultures and jackals,
Other animals that will come and take nourishment from the body parts.
But you can imagine the places where these what are called sky burials happen.
You can imagine how horrible,
Literally horrible,
The horror,
The stench,
The unrelenting reflection of our own death and discomfort that's there.
And this isn't that for you.
This isn't that for us in this moment of practice,
But it comes from that.
Because in these moments where our life is on fire,
Where we're facing our greatest fear,
Where we're facing into horrendous failure,
Heartbreak,
Some other situation that just has pain trumpeting in our ears.
It's like we're in the charnel ground.
We can close our eyes,
But we can't close our nose to the stench.
We can plug our nose,
But we can't stop our ears from hearing the vultures tearing at the flesh,
You know?
So this is a different kind of meditation.
And I offer this practice to you with so much love and so much compassion and having been there myself and having learned this practice,
Not out of curiosity,
But in moments where it was the only thing that was going to get me through the night.
So you make yourself comfortable here and that might mean lying down.
You might actually use this meditation to help you get to sleep.
I won't have an ending or a gong or anything at the end of the practice.
So if you drift off,
Let it be and may you find some relief.
You may want to sit in an upright posture in a traditional way.
I find that sometimes when it's really trumpeting,
When it's really a fiery kind of inner pain,
It helps to sit up.
It helps to almost have a vigilant posture.
Like you're bracing yourself against a wind.
When you're set,
All you have to do is just breathe and face it.
You just face the horror of this moment.
You face the pain just as it is in this moment.
Just as it is,
But listen,
Not worse than it is.
Just as painful as it is,
But not more painful than it is.
Just as bad as the situation is without making it worse in your mind.
I understand oftentimes this is just how it goes.
Part of the pain is the way that your mind is catastrophizing it and making it worse and imagining all the worst case outcomes.
That's the case.
That's just part of what you're facing.
But if you can soften that,
Breathe and just face the pain.
What does it actually feel like in your body?
Instead of bracing yourself against it or trying to focus on something else or relieve it,
Even using meditation stuff to relieve it.
For once,
Just let it.
What does it feel like to feel that pain?
What does it feel like to feel that fear,
That uncertainty?
Even if it feels like it's going to annihilate you,
Even if it feels so threatening,
Make yourself a little bit bigger,
Make yourself a little bit more open.
And just let it.
You're in pain.
You're in pain.
You don't want the situation.
But here it is.
The challenge is not to make stories.
That's the only discipline in this meditation.
It's just not to make stories out of the pain or give the pain too much dialogue or let too much of that pain get displaced into blame.
Others might be causing this pain.
There might be injustice.
That hurts even more.
In this practice,
I want to invite you to face it and not displace it.
Probably you're in so much pain that no teaching is going to be helpful right now.
But I'll give one,
Which is just the basic teaching of impermanence.
Whenever there's pain,
It comes with a companion that we call false permanence.
And I'm not just in pain right now,
But I'm always going to be in this pain.
But the reality is that right now it might be trumpeting and in a moment it'll just be humming.
Maybe in another moment it'll be trumpeting even louder,
But any sense of permanence is false.
That teaching may be useless in this moment,
I understand.
It's okay.
And I just keep making space,
Keep facing this fire.
Keep facing the pain.
Feel it in your body.
Is it changing?
Is you face it?
Is it actually annihilating you?
If you open yourself to it destroying you?
Is it moving around in your body?
Is it increasing?
Is it decreasing?
Your body,
You know,
You may feel like you want to shift,
Like you're sitting and you want to lie down or lying down and you want to sit up or stand up.
You might need to move a little bit,
Shake it out,
But don't distract yourself.
There's a kind of movement that is cathartic and there's a kind of movement that's just pacing the floor to distract yourself from the pain.
You're doing great.
You're not the first person to suffer in this way.
You're not the last.
See if there's anything else that's extra that you can take off of the pile.
Making stories,
Self-punishing,
You know,
Because there may be aspects of this that you brought on yourself.
Sometimes pain may be the result of mistakes that you've made.
Punishing yourself always makes it worse,
But avoiding it also is not the answer.
You just face it all.
Face it all.
It's impermanent.
Where is the pain in your body?
How is the pain showing up?
Changing or you finding any relief.
Settle in.
Don't wait for it to end.
Although it is impermanent,
It's almost as if we settle into it as if it's not going away.
There's something about the waiting for it to end that just makes it worse.
See if there's anything in your body where you can relax and make some space.
Ok.
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